Elysium Lost
by FluffleNeCharka
Summary: Tony's a beginning alcoholic whose past seeks to undo him. Gene is an abused and hurting soul, not a monster. The Rhodes family isn't as flawless as you might think. Even Pepper has her secrets. Character death, undecided pairings, drug and alcohol use.
1. After The Crash

Author's Note: An Ironman Nickelodeon animated series fanfic, done because we all know Tony Stark has alcoholic tendencies, and I don't believe being young would stop that problem from happening.

I own nothing. This particular incarnation of the Ironman series belongs to Viacom.

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Tony Stark was going to be okay.

He really was. Downstairs he could hear Rhodey talking, a voice as familiar as family's. Quite frankly, the Rhodes family might as well have been his right now. They were kind, loving, even understanding when he laid here for hours, unmoving and unresponsive. He knew they were worried, Rhodey most of all, but it had only been a day since his father died. They gave him space. Which was good, but not needed. He was fine. Everything was fine.

His dad was dead. His dad. _Dad_. The only person he could really talk to. His father understood his every thought and schematic. The words 'I don't get it' had never left his father's mouth in his entire life. When Tony spent all night tinkering on some new invention, his father understood. Not understood intellectually – emotionally, on a level other people didn't get. He knew what it was like to simply create, to let the thoughts become reality and see it manifest. He understood Tony's frustrations and shared his joy when things worked. He was so sincere, so genuine, that his son could tell him anything and everything. Tony had laughed at his father for saying that out loud (they both knew it, after all). And now he was dead.

Tony was staring at the backpack in the corner. It was one of the many things the Rhodes had gotten for him while he lay here, sleeping off substantial injuries. He didn't have much by the way of average kid things. He had always been more interested in science than toys. That was alright. He appreciated the effort. He just wished that the backpack had been left behind. Inside it was another reminder of both his parents that he didn't need or want. Well, didn't need, anyway. Want was another matter entirely.

No, he told himself. He had made a promise. He had told his father he would never, ever do that again. He'd meant it, too. Tony wanted to be a good man, like his dad. His dad was like some kind of super hero, standing for goodness in a world where money was all people cared about. His father was surreal in how strong his values were. Tony would and had gladly stopped his own bad behavior. He owed that much to his father, because he loved him. He still did, and felt he shouldn't break his promise even now. Death didn't release him from his word. His dad would hate it if he even knew Tony was thinking about it again. Fresh tears welled up behind Tony's eyes. _I guess that's one more thing I've failed at._

He should have seen it coming. He was a genius. He should have made something that could save his father. Why was he still alive? He should have asked the suit to get help. Maybe he should've put his father in suit. Maybe he should have just stayed awake long enough to get help himself. He should have realized that there would've been a plane crash. It wasn't like that was impossible. Some genius he was. He never did plan for mistakes and errors in the future. He never had back ups or prototypes. Here he thought that he was some great inventor, and he couldn't even make a basic airplane safe. He was such a _fool_. Because of that, his father was _dead_.

The weight of those two words was too much. He got up, and got the backpack. Bottom of the bag, in the water bottle. Always present, although he had sworn the stuff off. It was his last of it. He'd need more in the future. But he'd cross that bridge when he came to it.

For now, he had vodka.

It wasn't an addiction, or anything. It wasn't even a problem. This wasn't like before, to calm his nerves before he had a presentation of his ideas to CEOs. For one thing, he just sort of dabbled in it now and again. It wasn't like he was about to die of alcohol overdose or anything. For another, this wasn't some minor worry. This was the worst day of his life. This was Hell incarnate. He had never felt this low in his entire life. Everyone seemed so distant, everything was all too real. There was a void in his heart where his father should be. The world just felt _wrong_, wrong in a way it never had before. But he hadn't done it yet. He could back away and keep his promise. He could…

He couldn't, he realized, shutting his eyes tightly. His dad was dead. He didn't want to forget that, he just couldn't go on with that fact cutting through him like a knife. Tony just wanted to have a moment of peace. Just a little sip. He wouldn't get drunk. He wouldn't even drink all of the bottle. He'd just take the edge off of things, so it didn't hurt so bad. Just enough to fall asleep, he promised himself as his eyes opened. His father would understand if he was here. If his father was here, though, he'd be talking with him instead of doing this. That was how he'd planned to quit. Now that he was gone, wasn't it alright to have a little lapse in judgment? Just once?

The burning sensation was soothing. It comforted because it hurt in a way that wasn't bringing up bad memories. The warmth that soon spread to his insides was like a warm blanket. Drinking was euphoria. He was wrapped up in the taste, and nothing else. There was nothing else on his mind, no memories to haunt him or images that danced before his eyes. There wasn't any guilt or grief. Everything became taste, pain, smell, warmth. This was the kind of comfort that made it okay to be Tony Stark, even though he had never been fond of being himself. In this, he found a way to gloss it all over until nothing mattered, and everything was fine.

He drank. He stared at the ceiling. He focused on random, disconnected thoughts. He wondered what it would take to get more of this stuff now that he was here. He drank some more. He became aware of how tired he was, and how soft the blankets felt. By the time he was out of vodka, it had done its trick. Peace and contentment spread over him until he could feel nothing else. He barely had time to tuck the bottle away before he felt compelled to go to sleep and let everything that had gone wrong melt away from him. Later, he would wake up with his shirt off and his body tucked in courtesy of Mrs. Rhodes, who dismissed any lingering smell as just the odor of the guest room. Later he would open his eyes and groggily realize he had broken his promise, and feel ashamed. Later, he would resume being Tony Stark.

But for now, he was going to be okay.


	2. Real Life

_I don't know what life's supposed to be, but it's not supposed to be like this. - Huey Freeman, The Boondocks_

_Would you choose water over wine, to hold the wheel and drive? - Incubus, Drive_

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It feels so good to just give up real life once in a while.

Quite frankly, he doesn't know how he'd manage without it. His life isn't exactly going great at the moment. Every waking second is spent trying to bounce between being Tony Stark and Ironman. If he had his own way, he'd just be Ironman. It's easier that way. People respect him as a hero, and nerds all over the internet admire his technological savvy. Being Tony doesn't do very much other than remind him that his dad isn't there anymore. Tony misses the days spent laying in bed after working on his inventions all night long. He wants to go back to those days where everything seemed so easy and carefree that he thought he could give this up for good.

Nowadays he's been carefully self medicating. He can get whatever he wants from a few choice kids at school, and no one will question him because he's Tony Stark. No teacher would believe them if they reported him, no one denies him drinks given what's he's been through, so no one really knows just how hard he's been hitting the bottle. He's alright most of the time, he really is. All he needs is a little something to perk him up. He's never been drunk in his life. All he wants is a little exit from this constant work and constant motion. Sometimes all he wants is a break from real life, where everything can melt away into pure warmth and sensation. Even if it's not legal and it's not really right, it helps him through his life. It's not like he's getting plastered all the time. All Tony wants is to keep himself okay so he can set things right.

He knows its wrong, though, and that's way Rhodey can't know. Pepper can't know. No one can. Everyone has to see him as perfect. He's a funny guy and/or he's Ironman. He's the son of the greatest mind of the previous generation. He can't slip up. Everything is on him. He's alone in this, when it gets down to it. School doesn't mean anything. Nothing means anything. Deep inside there's a void, a numb vortex that is composed entirely of self hatred. If he were a better person, more like his father, everything would be okay. If he were smarter this wouldn't have happened. If only he wasn't Tony freaking Stark, naieve and sheltered and worthless, everything would be okay. But it isn't, and it never will be. The whole wrong is so broken. This is so wrong.

And he can't escape. That's what scares him most: the future. He can't stop drinking, he can't stop himself from all these thoughts and feelings that race down beneath the surface, and he can't stop the front he puts up that he's okay. Tony isn't sure what the future holds. He lives slowly, painfully, from moment to moment. Each decision is a mistake, every day is another day where Tony Stark, failure at all he attempts, will hurt his friends and break. He's breaking, he's crumbling under pressure and he can't escape. His entire life will be like this, over and over again until no one cares about him any more and he dies alone, a victim of overwork and perfectionism.

Vodka isn't strong enough. His friends smell the hard liquor on him, but they don't identify it. They have no idea what happened last night. They didn't see him cry and drink until he was too dizzy to drink any more. This isn't how it's supposed to be. Things aren't supposed to be so hard. Things were never this hard before. His father used to make him feel like nothing was wrong. There was no pressure. As he lay sprawled out on the floor last night, he realized that he could feel his heart beating, his pulse, all over his body. It was faint and inconsistant, and it slowed with time. Tony wondered if he was dying. He felt alone, and, he admitted to himself, hurting. That wasn't going to get any better by sitting here killing himself slowly. He had to try to make things right. He had to make things up to Pepper and Rhodey, or it would end up being too late. He doesn't want that. He doesn't want _this_.

It's time to stop giving up real life, and star living it.


	3. Flashbacks And Waking Nightmares

_So one by one, they turn from me. I guess my friends can't face the cold – but why I froze, not one among them knows, and never can be told. – Buffy the Vampire Slayer, after being ripped out of Heaven._

_Love is the slowest form of suicide – American proverb_

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It's not that he doesn't want to tell them.

It's that he can't. Because no matter what he tells himself or other people, at the end of the day the truth is he's not strong. He isn't strong, brave, tough or smart. He isn't man enough to face this. He's not even sure he wants to. If he told them, they'd only force him to quit. They don't understand. But then, nobody does, do they?

_His father's body was so pale. There was so much blood everywhere, the red smearing across everything he could see. Yet in his final seconds, perhaps he grasped some of what had happened, because his gentle, kind eyes were on Tony. He wasn't scared of death. He was just laying there, looking concerned and fearful and yet proud of the strange invention engulfing his son, saving him…_

The hard liquor didn't burn away the memories, but it burned away all his senses for just long enough that he could pretend that it did. He tried to focus only on his body, on the searing sensation of alcohol on his throat. Tony happily dismissed any tears streaming down his cheeks on the harsh drink. It helped a little, to tell himself that. Because that way, he didn't have to be embarrassed that he couldn't stop crying, couldn't stop shaking-

_The doctors were shaking their heads at him. He didn't make it, he'd taken the worst of the impact, saving Tony's life and he knew all the physics of the event before it had been explained to him. He knew every second of the impact, every broken bone, punctured vein and tiny detail of how it all happened. He was a genius. The physics behind a crash were simple, vivid truths that made him go numb all over. The nightmares, oh, god, the nightmares of this moment would haunt him forever. In the thousandths of a second he had to save his son, Mr. Stark had done it, and Tony could _see_ it in his mind, he knew the science of it so well._

It isn't enough. He hasn't had enough. He wants more. He wants to go downstairs and sob and scream and tell everyone the basic formula for impacts. He wants to explain how in order to experience the pain his father did in those last seconds, you'd have to be on fire. Tony stays put. They'd just make him stop, make him relive it all in therapy. They'd make fun of him at school, the kid who can't handle pressure.

And that's the real kicker, isn't it? His father lay there dying, his body aching and burning in ways no one else can imagine, and he was calm. Tony's here in a safe, warm house and he can't keep together. A sob that's part self hatred and part anguish ripped from his throat. He drowned it out with a gulp of this disgusting, repulsive drink. The pain is like a punishment, a harsh word from a father who isn't there to speak, a slap across the face he knows he's earned.

Past and present blur together. The heat of the crash, the agony. His father's body, the pool of blood. The red smears looked beautiful, Tony thinks to himself, drunkenly. That's what he wants, he thinks, to just rest in peace, calm and warm and surrounded by blood. Red. The color of love and passion, hatred and nobility. His father told him that in third grade, he remembers, and fresh tears spring to his eyes. But his father is gone, and he's alone again. He always ends up alone and sad and broken, doesn't he? He wants to be with his family again. He misses them so much.

_His mother was so sweet, so gentle. She used to sing nonsense songs under her breath while glaring at people. If she was caught, and asked what she said, she drew herself up to full height and sang the gibberish out proudly. She could make everyone laugh, because she was like life itself, light and bubbly and vivid._

The bottle is empty. It breaks against the wall easily enough. The jagged edges burn against his skin, burn deep and hard all over. Red blossoms up and down his right arm. Tony is left handed like his father. Gripping the glass tightly, he rakes it down his arm with all his might. Pain explodes into his world, hot and burning. Burning. Just like his father. He lays his head down against the floor, watching the blood seep out. He must have hit a vein.

That's good. That means he won't be alone soon. He'll be with his parents, where he can be loved and held and everything will be okay. Tears are streaming down his cheeks and yet he doesn't even notice at this point, too drunk and tired to care. He doesn't want to care about being tough and strong right now. He just wants to go to sleep and never wake up. He wants to wake up to find this has all been one hell of a dream. In the meantime he tries to fight off the images that are seared into his mind.

_They couldn't save her, and oh didn't she look disturbing like that, lifeless and listless. Without her normal cheery voice what was left of her was some kind of eldritch abomination. He fought the urge to scream. He couldn't stop staring, stop shaking – until his father wrapped his arms around him tight, holding him close._

He doesn't register that the door opens, or that Mrs. Rhodey screams. He doesn't even feel the pain anymore. He just rests, at long last free from all of this, if only for a little while, and by the time the ambulance comes he's unconscious and his pulse is weak, fading.

_There are tears in her eyes as she kisses him, whispering worried and loving things he can't quite catch. He thinks she's his mother, with those kind cold tan-gray eyes that shift in the light. He thinks he's in Heaven, and he's glad to be dead. He says as much to her, and she flees altogether, abandoning him to his world of darkness and peace. Confused, he drifts into a dreamless sort of void that chokes out all rational thought as he whimpers for her. "Mommy…"_

It's not until he wakes up in the ICU that he realizes he smells Pepper's shampoo on him, and doesn't understand why.


	4. Nakama In The Ice

There's a word in Japanese. It is nakama, and textbooks translate it as friend. Nakama is to friend what chess is to tic tac toe. Your friends like you. Your nakama loves you, would die for you, grieves with you and rejoices with you. Don't ever confuse tomodachi and nakama. Your tomodachi hangs out with you at the mall. Your nakama holds you close as you cry yourself to sleep. And while it's easy to acquire a good twenty some friends, most people are lucky to have two nakama. – Words We Don't Have, by Arisu Yamada

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This isn't how it's supposed to happen.

You're gone. I can't bring you back, though believe me I looked up everything I could on trying. But you slipped through to the other side before my eyes. I couldn't stop it, and I can't reverse it. You aren't here anymore, you're with Mom. Somewhere beyond, in that place science can't define and the universe can't contain, you're with her. I don't know what it's like, just that you're not here anymore.

It's selfish, isn't it? I'm not supposed to be like this. I'm supposed to bounce back. I'm supposed to take up the suit and avenge you. That's what heroes do. They fight for the ones who are gone, and they win. They don't stop, they never quit, they keep going until they die a glorious death. A hero doesn't break under pressure, he thrives. A hero doesn't cry at night for the ones who aren't here, he clenches his teeth and seethes and resolves to keep fighting this fight. What I'm doing is wrong.

I'm not meant to cry. I'm not supposed to crack. I'm supposed to be able to do it all. That's what a hero does, and that's what a Stark does. This isn't how it's supposed to be. I'm too weak to be a hero. I'm too tired to keep fighting this fight anymore all alone. Heroes in comics and movies always find some people to confide in. I used to have you, but if you were here I wouldn't have to play this part in the first place, would I? I know who I'm supposed to confide in. Pepper and Rhodey. They love me.

And I want to tell them. I want to tell them everything, about the day Mom died and I drank for the first time. All I want to do is tell them about the pain and the confusion and the pressure, the awful pressure that I've let control my every move. I want them to know the weights I carry every day. I've thought about it, about telling them. That's what a hero does. He goes to his friends, they make him feel better and then he bounces back better than ever.

But I can't, because deep down, under the layers of anger and arrogance and snark, there's a problem. The problem you and I never talked about because I didn't let us talk about it. The flaw that no machine can fix. The glitch in my own internal programming that no technician can make right. You always wanted me to face it. I didn't want to. I loved you, Dad, but I couldn't even explain it to you, could I? This is why I fail at being a hero. It's why I don't feel like I can handle the world.

People are static to me. They elude me. They confuse me. I don't understand them. I don't understand emotions. It took me so long to even understand expressions, to know a smile meant happiness and a frown meant the opposite. It took me so long to understand sarcasm, tone, and you saw the problem long ago. You knew that people, to me, are the world's greatest mystery. They're like static transmissions: there's a meaning, I know there is, it's so close to the surface I can almost hear it, but I can't.

I never learned how to tell someone how I feel, because my own feelings are like static. They're there, but how do I say it? How do I explain the void your death created, the pure icy cold that floods me for days on end? Everything gets so hot and angry and vicious and twisted sometimes, then it goes cold. That's what I am. Cold. But that's not an emotion, is it? Happy, sad and angry are emotions. Cold, confused and lost aren't. I speak and it's static, it's Esperanto, it's gibberish. The words make since to me, just not to anyone else. Even you didn't understand how frigid and isolated my world could get.

They're not static. They're perfect binary, and I'm the glitched one. I'm the error in the system. A faulty piece of programming. That's what I am, incompatible with other human beings. I want to be. I want to tell them all the things I'm thinking and feeling. But we're divided by a common language. _I'm_ the raving lunatic, the demented one, not them. Pepper and Rhodey are wonderful people. The biggest problem in my life is me.

This isn't how it's meant to be. Heroes stand tall, they push aside their emotions, they work through them. I'm the one who's the problem here. I'm not the first person out there to lose their dad. The only difference between heroes and whatever I am is that they rise above it. I'm trapped within it, Dad. I'm trapped within your death. The images haunt me. The sounds ring in my ears. There's a stab of ice right to my core whenever I think about it, but dammit, ice isn't an emotion and core's not the right word and no one understands. I tried to tell them about it and no one knew. No one can ever know, can ever understand.

I don't care if they make me stop drinking. I just want to stop being frozen inside. It's so cold, so cold and empty and meaningless everyday. Except for when it's hot, burning and hate consumes every thought I have. And that's not right. That's not how it's supposed to be. A hero is supposed to have pain like any human being does, but he's not supposed to only feel hate and apathy. There's supposed to be something more than that to being alive, isn't there?

Pepper is above me right now. She has been for fourteen minutes and thirteen seconds. She smells like Herbal Essences shampoo and mandarin orange perfume. Neither smell covers up that faint little tinge of salt that comes with tears. She's frozen and electric. In everyone else's world that's sad and worried, but in my head that's my first thought. I don't perceive emotions correctly. That's what the therapist said when I was six and I couldn't give him the right name for the smiley and frowny faces. What that means, the full ramifications of that, are only just now manifesting.

I'm broken. That's the real truth. I'm broken and Pepper isn't. Pepper is real, tangible, normal. She perceives emotions perfectly. She can even read broken people. And I could open my eyes, tell her that I'm okay and act confused. I could say I only got drunk once and it was an accident. But she's never fooled by me. She and Rhodey see the brokenness, the problem. They sense my lies and what I'm feeling. Their feelings and mine may be like oil and water, but that doesn't stop them from being able to spot mine. With time they've learned how things work in my little broken world.

So I can't lie. Should I tell her, then, about this whole mess? How much do they know? How much would that set back Iron Man? More importantly, even if I fooled everyone into thinking I was okay, how far would that set back Tony Stark? And underneath those two, what about me? What about the person under all those masks? He's me, and he's drowning in a sea of ice. You always wanted to free me from it, Dad. You thawed me as best you could. Now that you're gone I'm trapped on a sheet of ice, and underneath there's a whirlwind of emotions I've been avoiding. I want to face them now. I want to feel something again.

If I reach out to her, will she understand? Will she know what the ice and fire mean, that those are what I feel? Am I so strange an alien by now that no one can understand me? This is where I go when I'm gone. When you stood right next to me and I was a million miles away, I was here, in this place between my reality and the world's, trapped in contemplation. But if I sit here forever and just keep going in circles, I'll spend forever here. I don't want to. I want to be in Pepper and Rhodey's world. I don't want to stay frozen anymore.

Opening my eyes, I reach out, and I take Pepper's hand, so I can do what a hero is supposed to do, and rise above.


	5. Broken

The things we remember best are those better forgotten. – Serbian proverb

When someone has something really important to say, they say it in less than three sentences. – Another, much, much older Serbian proverb. As in, before-Jesus-was-born old.

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Pepper's been out here for six hours.

Gene knows, on some level, that that's not healthy. He knows she's been out here ever since official visiting hours ended, and she'll be right back inside when they begin. She needs sleep. She needs food. She can't move from this spot, painfully rooted to the moment, thought glued to Tony. He knows all this because that's exactly how he feels. There's not much he can say that would help, so he just stands nearby, quietly watching. He can't speak. There's nothing within him that can describe what he's thinking and feeling right now. All he can do is watch as Pepper falls apart. He's desperate for her to yell at him, call him names, something. Even one glare would be great right about now.

Instead, she swings. The swing set is Pepper's way of taking out her aggression. It's also less than two blocks from the hospital. When she wasn't at her house, he knew she'd be somewhere close to Tony. Sure as heck, she's aggressively pumping away on the swing set. She's already gone over the top on a few of the others. Gene's sure he should be worried, but honestly he's not sure he's in any position to talk right now. After all, he spent the last hour ranting and raving to Jean about how this is all his fault. That's what Pepper's doing. She's venting. Gene thinks he understands on some level, so he just takes a seat on the merry go round and watches her.

She's not so bad, he thinks. There's always been an undercurrent of tension to them on the subject of Tony. She doesn't understand why he's so close to Tony, why they spend hours together. On some level she's jealous of that. She can never understand why, because neither Gene nor Tony will tell her. Even if they did, it would only make things worse between them. She would only view him as weak and hate him even more intensely. She's blindingly angry right now, cussing up a storm under her breath. Is she angry? He isn't sure, but he knows it scares him. She might do something rash in her angry storm of hate and then –

Pepper can't decide who she's more furious at, herself, Tony, or Stane for causing all this. She settles on the last option, and words begin to sneak out through her clenched teeth. Under the starlight, Gene pretends he can't see the tears in her eyes. Her voice fades in and out with each swing. There's a note of hysteria in her voice, a trace of panic and fear that works itself up into a hurricane of emotion. She hates Stane and she loves Tony and she hates herself and everything's so messed up and –

Her grip on the swing's chains slips. She crashes into Gene. Before she can even apologize, his arms wrap around her on sheer instinct, and she _breaks_, sobbing into his chest. He's there, murmuring, comforting, knowing. He's been up and down this same emotional rollercoaster constantly since it happened. He'll go through it again. Nothing makes sense, so all he can do is hold onto her until the dawn breaks and they can go see Tony again. She can't stop crying, and there's going to be a wet patch on his shirt, yet he just pulls her closer. Gene can't let her down like he did Tony. He can't fail to be there twice. It's too late to go back and stop himself from messing up that first time, but Pepper's still right here. She needs someone. She can't do this alone. _He_ can't do this alone. And he is, painfully so.

So he holds her, and murmurs soothing little nothings into her ear. He rubs her back like his mother would for him. The thought of his mother makes him shiver, but no, those are bad memories, and no that never happened shut up shut up shut up. Amber eyes narrow as he forces himself to come back to reality. None of that is real. Well, no, some of it has to be. He just can't tell the delusions from the real memories from the magically implanted ones anymore. It's easier to shut his eyes and focus on what's real. Pepper is real. She's firm, and soft. He can smell perfume, shampoo and tears on her when he leans in to bury his face in her hair. Every tear brings a shaky, shuddering wince to her. Pepper is real. What happened to Tony is real. These are not delusions. This is really happening.

He can do little more than hold her, awkwardly, arms wrapped around her waist tightly. He hums a soothing tune, trying to keep any more memories from surfacing. Apparently these are the right actions, because gradually the incoherent, hysterical sobbing works itself down to a low whimper accompanied by sniffling. She's cold. She's been out here for way too long; he can feel her pulse in her icy bare arms. Gene gently pries her off of him for long enough to get his jacket onto her. He looks her over, taking in the redness of her eyes, the downcast expression and the tear stained cheeks. He knows he can't leave her out here, but she's not ready to face the world yet. What to do…

"Gene? What's that on your wrist?"

He realizes his mistake, and tries to leave. She grabs him – by the _hand_, deliberately – and yanks him back. Her eyes, the color of a dirt road and usually filled with contempt, are wide now with concern. He braces himself for the anger, for the hate, since he knows surely now she'll hate him even more than she already did. After all, he was just a pretty, arrogant jerk she thought had a heart of gold before. Now he's that with a dark secret she can use to blackmail him forever. All his family's fortune, hers. Instantly. She wouldn't be the first person to betray him. Everyone does, especially the people he trusts. He trusts her. He cares for her. He can feel himself begin to shake. This isn't what it looks like, not at all. It truly isn't. Tony is closer to the truth. He knows that this is Gene's step-dad's doing, though he knows not how it was done or what it means. A lie, he thinks, he needs a lie to tell Pepper. She can't know the truth. She can't even know the partial truth. She'll kill him, she'll hate him, she… she…

She's scared. She looks scared. "Gene," she asks again, softly, pushing his sleeve up, "What is this? Is this Chinese?" And her fingers brush up against the burn scar, making him gasp audibly. Her spindle like fingers retract, an apology forming in her eyes first and then her lips. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you. Did… did you do it?"

A heavy silence. His tawny, sunset gold eyes shut tightly for a moment. When he opens his eyes, his expression is devoid of any emotion. His eyes are cold and distant. Pepper shudders, repulsed and somehow greatly frightened. The look on his face is that of a killer, of someone pushed so far they'd gone completely over the edge. He looks empty, hollow, _dark_. It's like she's suffocating just looking at him, but on some level she knows, before he even speaks, that he's not okay. He's not cool with this. He wants to be, he wants everyone to think he's perfect and normal and fine.

"My step-father did it. It's the hanzhi for worthless."

But in truth, he's broken, she thinks, and she's frozen to the spot as he leaves, not bothering to ask for his jacket back.


	6. Emotional Static

"_Kill me," I cried, and love said "No."_

"_Leave me, for dead and let me go."_

_And love said, "No."_

_- Finnish rock band HIM, 'Love Said No'_

_And I know, yes I know, that my life's not over yet. So I'll try, yes I'll try, hope's on the horizon. It's not over yet, I'm alive, so I'll try, try for that horizon…_

_- Mandopop artist Liu Yi Fei, 'Yin Yun Cao'_

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The therapist was really concerned, Tony knew.

She was warm, warm and open and soft-spoken. Whatever that translated to outside Tony's world, he knew she really cared. She could sense how cold and heavy his heart was. She could have taken a dozen other cases if she'd wanted to. The hospital was busy, and new kids were admitted every few hours. But she didn't want an easy kid. Her job wasn't about what was easy, it was about helping people. So despite how cold he was, she had stayed. That meant a lot to him, because his biggest fear was getting a therapist who treated him like an experiment. He'd had enough of that when he was six and everyone had begun to realize what was wrong with him.

The problem was explaining himself. Putting this into words. They were, he thought, divided by a common language. They could understand each other if he talked about robotics or science or physics. She would know what he meant if he tried to get technical. It was when he tried to get emotional that the problem occurred. He wasn't using the right words. He was like a foreign exchange student: he knew what he wanted to say, everything just came out wrong. He didn't mean for it to happen, but no matter how hard he tried to correct it, it always happened. There was a flicker of heat inside him whenever he thought about it. Tony sighed, closing his eyes. _That's not the right word._ He knew if he answered all the therapist's questions like this, she wouldn't understand. But what else was he supposed to do?

"Why did you do it, Tony? That's the really important thing here," she said, dark blue eyes warm – no, worried. Damn he was bad at this. "If you can just tell me that, we can get through this, I promise. Please, sweetie, I want you to get better, but you have to talk to me first."

He looked at her with cold, weary eyes. "You won't get it. You'll think I'm nuts." When the warmth in her eyes didn't go away, he bit his lip, searching for words. "Really. Everyone always says I'm nuts when I try to explain this. It's kind of confusing to me. You won't get it, Mrs. Verde."

She smiled gently at him. "It's my job to 'get it'. That's what I do. Just talk, Tony, and I'll listen."

"Everything… everything gets cold inside, sometimes. Everything is so cardboard and common and worthless. I feel like I'm sleepwalking through my life because my Dad's not here. And the cold and ice fill up everything until there's nothing left, and that's so empty. It's suffocating. Then when I drink things get – warmer, I guess. I thaw out. I can cry and feel bad and for that little bit of time I'm real. It doesn't last. It wears off. I go back to being on this other planet where no one else is. It's like everyone around me is speaking Esperanto and I'm the freak lapsing into Ido.(1) We understand each other's words, but no one can see how frozen I am and even when they can, they can't help. I'm just… broken, I guess."

Mrs. Verde wrote something down. He didn't ask what. When she spoke next, her voice was warmer than it had ever been, like an embrace. "Tony, I'm going to ask you to do a little exercise with me, based on what your past therapist has theorized. It's like word association, but a little different. Just say the first thing that comes to your mind. How does my voice sound right now?"

"Warm – no, wait, I mean, that's not," he fumbled, realizing his mistake.

"No, Tony. Don't try to change your answer. It's okay, sweetie," she added, softly, as he winced. "This isn't a test with right or wrong answers. And no one else will ever see this, so just relax. It's okay."

She shifted her tone to an abrupt, harsh one. "How does this sound?"

"Hot. Scorching." He watched her heart shaped face for any sign that he'd answered wrong or she was judging him, but she simply wrote something down before continuing.

A listless, unaware and inflectionless tone. "How does this sound?"

"Cold."

A confused, questioning voice. "How about this?"

"Unstable."

_That_ got him a raised eyebrow, but it was more out of surprise than anything else. Her eyes remained warm and thoughtful. Tony tried to suppress the urge to begin lying his ass off. For one, he'd told her too much to back out now, for another he couldn't think of anything convincing, though part of his mind was certainly trying to. He was torn between putting on the mask of Tony Stark, perfectly normal and naïve boy genius, and facing this as himself.

A happy, ditzy, carefree voice snapped him out of his reprieve. "And this one?"

"Energy. Alive. Real. Pepper," he added with a small smile. "Don't tell her I said that. She'll either get mad or hug me. Maybe both."

Then came the tone he'd been dreading, the pained, downcast one. 'Sad' by normal human standards. "This one?"

"Broken. Shattered. Me."

Silence fell. He watched her with cold, guarded eyes. She scribbled something down before meeting his eyes. Hers were still warm, albeit unstable and questioning. She was worried. Of course she was. Who wouldn't be? He thought he understood how she felt, as well as he was capable of such a thing. She was trying to decode Tony's world, translate what he was saying into something that made sense. She wanted to speak his language. The layer of guarded ice in his eyes flickered and died out. This wasn't some interrogative authority figure, he realized. She was just trying to help.

His fear was that perhaps there was no helping this. For all the warmth and concern in her eyes, she wasn't broken like he was. He'd been born like this. He knew what it was, he knew what she was thinking, too. Tony Stark perceived and showed emotions in the same way a sociopath did. But he wasn't a sociopath. He felt fear and guilt, two things a true sociopath was incapable of. And so the therapist was left with nothing, because no one ever told them how to treat a partial sociopath. Those didn't exist. It was impossible. Tony repressed the urge to smirk. Everything he did was impossible. Apparently he'd been pulling that off ever since birth.

"Tony," Mrs. Verde said softly, "You've got some problems perceiving emotions, but even at a glance I can say you've made leaps and bounds of progress since the last time you were in therapy. It's very, very good to know you have some kind of system for identifying feelings, especially within yourself."

"Is there… will I ever feel warm again? Without being drunk."

"Yes, Tony. It won't be easy, but we'll work through this together. You'll be warm again. There's just a cloud in front of the sun right now."

Tony smiled. Maybe she could speak his language after all.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

1. Esperanto is a construct language spoken primarily by world-peace loving nerds nowadays. Ido is an inflection based dialect of Esperanto. They're a lot like Russian and Serbian, French and Quebec François, Beijing Mandarin and Wu Xing Mandarin, or Spanish and Catalan – speakers can understand each other, but they're foreign to each other at the same time. They're separate languages and the same all at once. It's ninety percent the same with ten percent painful, jarring language barrier. The slang is different, the expressions are different, the metaphors stop making sense, but you understand all the basic words.

You are, in other words, divided by a common language.

(Pardon me for the shortness of this chapter. I'll get better at this, I promise.)


	7. Thoughts Like Choas

Author's Note: And here, dear readers, is where I both get back into canon's timeline and go way out of continuity at the same time. Also, finding quotes online is obnoxiously hard because no one can ever agree on the exact wording.

* * *

_Where guilt is, hate and courage abound._ – Ben Jonson

_Before you embark down the path of revenge against any one man, you should first two graves. _– Zhen Xiao

* * *

The day Tony was released from the hospital, he got captured by Stane.

Not his finest hour, he thought weakly. Not his best day. And then it got worse, because he realized what would happen if he vanished for too long. The hospital had only grudgingly released him as an out patient. This was putting his freedom in jeopardy and quite frankly everything was getting hot. Electric hot, searingly, dangerously hot. His mind was racing. And the thoughts… the thoughts were back.

Those horrible thoughts. Those lovely, tempting, amazing ideas that swirled through his head late at night. He fought this so much, this urge to kill. But vengeance was a hard thing to ignore. It was satisfying to think about it. It wasn't right, but it was incredibly satisfying to imagine what he'd do to them. These madmen, these villains, these murderers of innocents. They deserved slow painful deaths and in the Iron Man suit he could do that. He could make them suffer and them snuff them out in an instant.

Wrong. It was wrong. He wasn't supposed to like it. He wasn't supposed to feel so warm and hot and glorious about it. Rhodey didn't understand, could never understand; he had never known Tony's darkest secret. He couldn't ever be told because he didn't get it. He didn't have any clue how deep the hole went, how much of Tony's heart had been destroyed by the loss of his father. The pain was haunting, an ever present ache and sense of loneliness that followed him like a shadow.

There were no shadows in the dark. It was an old proverb from the Southern parts of the United States: Character is what you are in the dark. When there was no one to answer to, who was Tony Stark? When his friends weren't there to stop him, when he had no father to act responsible for, no family name to uphold, what was he? He knew the answer. Rhodey hadn't; now that he did he was not pleased. The black boy had thought that underneath the layers of Tony there was a good heart. He didn't realize the full extent of the darkness lurking under the surface.

Hate. Swirling hot hate lay behind those gray-blue eyes, the color of the sky just after a volcanic explosion. Rhodey thought he knew who Tony was. What he had never known until this day was that there was more to Tony than grief, loss and lovable witticism. Deep beneath the Tony Stark the world got to see there was a monster lurking, waiting for a chance to surface. It had been restrained for so long it was easy to forget its presence. But when Tony built those weapons it shone through. Rhodey saw the dark dangerous part of him, the dark passenger that had been there ever since his mother died.

The thoughts. They haunted him more than he could ever dare explain. He wanted to tell Rhodey the truth, that he wanted out of this and was trapped. Deep inside of him there had always been bursts of explosive anger, ever since that day. That day Rhodey didn't know about where Tony had done something he could never, ever be redeemed of. Something had changed then. From that point forward violence had changed for him. It was exciting, intriguing, amazing. Beautiful. Everything within him fought his conscious mind. He wanted to watch the carnage and the blood spilling the world had to offer. In his off hours, behind closed doors, he tried horror movies. They were nothing. They could never compare to the sheer, total finality of a death up close and personal.

Bad Tony. Bad Tony, bad thoughts. No, that never happened. The therapists had made it go away, the therapists and the lawyers had covered up every single trace of it. There was nothing on any record to indicate he was anything other than a depressed and grieving orphan. He never had a fight at school or a violent moment in the labs. He had fought down the thoughts and the urges to be destructive. Why destruction felt so good, he didn't know. Or rather, he did know. They couldn't suppress the memory of what he'd done. He was a violent person by nature, a sociopath – except he felt love, compassion, things no sociopath ever felt. He was trapped in the middle of some great internal war, stuck between the evil part of him and the heroic part of him.

The truth was that in the dark Tony Stark was three people: The Savior, The Satan and The Child. He was a hero, evil, and normal all at once. He wanted to save the world, he liked watching people who deserved it suffer and yet he wanted to throw all of that away. He wanted to close his eyes and go back to those preschool days where everything was simple. He wanted to care about sports and mascots and rivalries. He didn't want this. He never asked to be sick and twisted in his head. He never asked to moderate the war between the two extreme sides of him. He'd tried to get rid of himself so the world could move on like it was supposed to, as if getting rid of him would somehow solve all the Earth's problems. As if it could undo everything he'd done.

In a moment of childish violence he had done something so unspeakable that his father had never forgiven him until his last few seconds. In those nanoseconds of decision he had saved his son's life, telling him silently that he was forgiven. He truly was, despite the unforgivable atrocity that had scarred them both for life. The alcohol was to blame in part for Tony's actions, but that wasn't everything. That didn't explain it all. Part of it was pure anger, jealousy and hate. Tony knew the truth: he didn't deserve forgiveness. He didn't deserve to see that love in his father's eyes as the man drew his last breath.

That was why he had to do whatever it took to save his father's name, his father's company. If that meant unleashing his dark side on people that was okay. If it meant dying that was okay. He didn't deserve to be alive anymore. He didn't deserve to survive that plane crash. He wasn't even human, he thought sometimes. When that hate overtook reason he was nothing more than a violent monster. Rhodey was right to hate him. Rhodey was a better person than Tony. He felt no deep urge to kill for revenge. He felt no perverse pleasure from seeing those bastards who killed his father hurt and broken. And why should he? He was a good person, a wonderful guy who never hurt a soul. Unlike Tony…

"Tony?" It was Rhodey. How did he get in here without him knowing? Oh, right, the security's retina scans. Rhodey and Pepper had full access to his sanctuary. Why he was here at this hour, Tony didn't have a clue. "Are you crying?"

"Rhodey, I'm so sorry," Tony blurted out. "I'm so sorry, I never wanted you to see me like I was today, I'm sorry-"

"It's okay, man," Rhodey assured him gently. His eyes were wide, fearful. Compassionate as always, like a normal sane human being. "I didn't mean to freak you out like this. Just calm down – have you been drinking?" When Tony shook his head no, Rhodey breathed out a sigh of relief. "Well, that's good. See, we're making progress. Just calm down, okay?"

"Nothing is okay. I'm a monster," he confessed softly. "I'm a horrible person. It should've been me in that plane crash. I deserve it-"

"No, you don't!" Rhodey shot back, worry lit anew in his eyes. "Don't talk like that! I may not like your weapons and your plans but I know you, Tony. You're a good person, you just get carried away sometimes."

"No."

Rhodey blinked. "Come again?"

"I'm not a good person. I'm not. I… Rhodey, I killed someone. I…" but that whispered secret seemed to drain everything out of Tony, and he buried his face in his hands. "I'm… I… I didn't… I was…"

True horror was written on Rhodey's face. "You did what?" he whispered hoarsely. "I didn't see that on the monitors here, so when? How?"

"Not as Iron Man," Tony replied, sounding distant. "Me. I killed her, Rhodey. I was so mad, so angry and drunk and stupid. Sometimes I just think all these horrible thoughts and I can't stop myself from exploding. You've seen the weapons. You've seen the fights. You know how I get. I didn't mean it, I didn't want to, I called 911 and my dad but it was too late. I'm not a good person, Rhodey. There's no line between me and the people I'm fighting. I'm one of them, a villain, _evil_. I should've died in that plane crash, my dad never should've saved me, I-"

"But who, Tony?" Rhodey pressed on, sounding scared and lost. "Who did you…"

"My mother, Rhodey. I killed my mother."


	8. Nakama Of Two

_A family without a black sheep is not a typical family._ – German psychologist Henrich Boill

_Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember, than to forgive and forget._ – Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth

_'I am furious with you and I demand an explanation' is friend-speak for 'I love you and I desperately want to know why you did this thing because I'm worried and too much of a jackass to just say it'. But then sometimes someone_ does_ come out and say it, and it's so stunning to you that you forget how to lie. And that's where Real True Friendships (RTFs) come from._ – American comedian Lylette Hsu

* * *

"Tony…"

Tentatively, Rhodey reached out to touch him. Tony was sobbing uncontrollably now. But Rhodey didn't back away, gently wrapping his arms around his friend. The sobs shook Tony's body and his breathing was ragged. Too much exertion, too soon. Rhodey caught the smell of oils and metal on Tony. No alcohol, just as advertised. He was sober, so now it was time to make sense of everything. Absolutely everything, from beginning to finish. If they were going to make it through this, they were going to have to have no secrets from each other.

"Tony, talk to me. Tell me what happened. Please, just calm down, okay? Take a deep breath. Don't you _dare_ clam up on me now. For once in your life just let me help you, dammit!" Rhodey inhaled sharply to keep his own temper in check. "Let me help you Tony. Let me be there for you, _let someone in_. Please, just talk. Don't freak out and get defensive, just tell me everything. I'm here for you, okay?"

What Rhodey was asking for, he had no idea. He didn't know what dark secrets lay inside Tony Stark's head. But he knew he would be there for him. He was Tony's best friend. He was incapable of leaving him or turning him into the police even if he wanted to. All he wanted was to get Tony to finally open up to someone, just once, let out all that pain and insanity so that it wasn't stuck inside him. "This is your cross, but you don't have to carry it alone," he said softly, thinking out loud. "If you're not willing to talk to me, then hear me out. Stop wiping your nose on my shirt and sit down, Tony. I've got a few things to say to you."

Tony did as he requested, looking scared and lost. "Rhodey, I'm sorry, I should never have gotten drunk in your house and I really shouldn't have tried to end it there and I-"

"Tony, I never thought I'd say this to you and not Pepper, but shut up and listen. I'm not mad at you. You don't have to apologize. You just have to trust for once in your goddamn life." Rhodey's hands clenched into tight fists as he continued. "You have no idea what you've put through. And don't tell me you're sorry. I'm not trying to get a guilty apology out of you and I'm not trying to guilt trip you. I… Look man, I love you. Not in a gay way, but in the way I love my family and Pepper. You're part of my life like they are. You mean everything to me like they mean it all to me. Know what the difference is between them and you?

They come to me! They rely on other people! That's what everyone else does because humans are social animals, Tony. We love and we support each other. Everyone I know has a support network of friends and family to rely on and you're the only person I know who won't use that network. Pepper and I could have helped you, listened to you, been there for you! I would've been there for you if you'd just come to me and say something like a normal person would – but you don't do that. No man is an island, Tony, but you're trying really hard and I don't get why.

So listen to me for once: I may not understand everything that goes on in your head, the whole hot cold system your therapist explained, but I will _never_ stop trying to understand. You're not just like family, Tony. You're my brother and I will be there for you until the day one of us dies. I'd died for you Tony. I would do it in a heartbeat and I wouldn't regret it because we're family. But I can't help you if you won't let me. I can't be there to comfort you if you go get drunk every time things get wrong. No one can save you if you don't show them anything's wrong!"

By now, hot tears were rolling down Rhodey's cheeks. Tony's had dried up as he gaped at his friend. But Rhodey's rant was a far cry from over. "Do you know what it was like when they took you to the hospital? I've cried more since that day than I have in my entire life. You were broken inside and out and it was all my fault because I couldn't see it coming. Blindsided doesn't even start to describe it. And everyone was crying and shaking and freaking out so I had to be the responsible one. I've always had to be the responsible one. It's what I do. And do you know why I kept it together? Because I had to go scour every place you might've hidden booze and I had to call Pepper and Gene to let them know. I love them – yes, even Gene, Tony, don't give me that look. He's our friend and I had to tell him someone he always hung out would be painfully missing from his life, maybe forever.

I still feel like shit for not being there for you Tony. But I'm not God and I don't have mind reading powers. You have to let me in, me, Pepper, Gene, _someone_, because I'm not going to lose you again. I'm not going to have to sit there in the waiting room while they do a blood transfusion ever again. I'm your brother and I'm going to help you even if you don't want me to. Stop apologizing, stop working yourself to death and start opening up. When you feel like this," he gestured to the pile of tissues, "_Tell_ me. Call me. I have been your friend since you were three years old. You can trust me. So now that you and I have had our tears and our friendship speeches, you're going to tell me the whole story about your mom. You're going to do it because you need to get that weight off of you and you'll tell me the whole truth because there is nothing you could ever, _ever_ do that I wouldn't forgive you for. Start talking, Tony. Now."

Tony took several seconds to get his thoughts together. "Rhodey… I never knew you cared about me like that. Holy crap, have you felt like this for long?"

"Try thirteen years or so," Rhodey said with a small smile. "And for the record I'm pretty sure Pepper and Gene feel the same way." He sat down in a chair next to Tony. "Now, we're alone miles from any eavesdropper in one of the most secure locations on Earth. Tell me everything about your mom, Tony. You can trust me."

"I… I really can, can't I?" the brunette said as if this was a new realization. "You won't hate me either, will you? Because we're…"

"Friends, boy genius. The word you're looking for is friends."

And in spite of the gravity of the situation, Tony smiled.


	9. Bubblegum Schnapps

Author's Notes: You'll note I'm quoting Seether twice. That's because this particular band, led by an on-again-off-again alcoholic, has a lot of songs that remind me of Tony Stark. Also, hunting for quotes on the internet is a pain in the ass and I'm running out of witty philosophers and the like who have relevant things to say. I don't like quoting comedians because people generally disregard anything they have to say, but I have a plethora of quotes gleaned from Comedy Central that really, really work. Hopefully my readers can restrain the urge to roll their eyes if I end up spouting off some George Carlin or Christopher Titus come next update.

Finally, I would like to note I appreciate all the reviews I've gotten. I've never had much confidence in my writing, having been told for years by my teachers that I write rather poorly and am not descriptive enough. To hear people saying that my work is not only bearable, but enjoyable is uplifting in ways you can't even imagine.

* * *

_It seems like every day's the same and I'm left on my own. It feels like everything's gray and there's no color to behold. They say it's over, and I'm fine again. Try to stay sober, feels like I'm dying. And I am aware now that everything's gonna be fine one day, too late, I'm in Hell. _- Seether, 'One Day, Too Late'.

_I can't stand myself in the mirror. I_ _disgrace_ _myself in the mirror. I see you in me, I feel you in me. Leave me, I can't face myself anymore._ - Seether, 'Distrust'.

* * *

"Rhodey, I… I killed my mom, Rhodey," Tony took a deep breath, then another, each shuddering and deep. "Oh God, I never should've started telling you this, I never should've… Rhodey, don't hate me. Sometimes I just get so mad and I do stupid things. You've seen my temper. You know I don't mean it, I just have no self control," these last few words were said with a large dose of self hatred. He sighed sharply, looking again. "But that doesn't change what happened. I'm a _monster_, Rhodey. I got mad and I… look, are you sure you want to know the details? Isn't it bad enough just to know I did it? Don't you hate me?"

"That better be rhetorical." Rhodey looked at him with a mixture of love and understanding. "Tony, I know you. There's probably either a very good reason for this or alcohol involved. Maybe both. But no, I don't hate you and no, it's not enough to know she's dead and you did it. I need to know how, why, when and where because bottling this stuff up is driving you insane. You need to tell me everything you can remember."

"I can't. If I do, you'll never look at me the same way again. You'll know how evil I am and quite frankly that's terrifying," Tony admitted with a wince. "I'm not the nice guy everyone thinks I should be. I'm not a good and righteous super hero, Rhodey. I'm not even a decent human being."

"I beg to differ. Who's the one working his ass off to save the city? You. Who's going to stop Stane from stealing weapons of mass destruction? You. Who's saved my life more times than I can count?"

"I put you in danger in the first place, Rhodey. I'm such an idiot sometimes, I don't know how you and Pepper put up with me. I'm a danger to everyone I care about. Rhodey, you have no idea what I did and if everyone else knew they'd hate me. You think friends are some big extended family but you don't realize that's because they think I'm something I'm not. They think I'm good. Then my temper and all this hate comes to the surface and they get glimpses of how awful I am. Glimpses don't show them how evil I am, though, so everyone just tells themselves nothing's wrong. The truth is, nothing's ever been right.

My mother was pregnant when she died. You know that, right? You remember how big her belly got. You remember how she spent every second talking about the baby. She spent all her time shopping for it, planning out the life of her next child. Because she wasn't going to let the next one turn out like me. She wasn't going to have to put up with another genius who spent all their time in labs. This baby was going to be normal and perfect. Unlike me," he added softly. "Perfect and normal. She was going to make sure Dad didn't teach it how to read so early and keep it away from all the technological stuff. My little sibling was going to go to a nice normal school and be good. In other words, she wanted to replace me. I was a mistake. I was never supposed to be here and I knew very well that this was going to be her favorite kid. And I… Rhodey, I couldn't take it. It made me so bad, so furious. I wanted to cry and scream because I never had a favorite parent and here she already had her favorite kid picked out. She never spent any time with me. Everything was about the baby and the little kid hadn't even been born yet.

I eight, almost nine. I was angry. I was scared she might forget me and Dad altogether and go off to live with the baby. I heard her talking about it on the phone once. I heard her tell people all the time when I was supposed to be out of earshot that I was an exhausting kid to put up with. She kept saying how she wanted a normal kid. One time after she spent the better part of an hour explaining to her friend on the phone how she wouldn't let another techie come into the world and I had poor social skills, so on and so forth, I got furious. I mean that horrible furious where you're proud if you punch someone even though they're in pain, that hot fury that scares you even in small doses." Tony inhaled slowly. He looked over at his friend, whose whole and total attention was focused on him. "Last chance to say you don't want to know, Rhodey. Can you just leave it at knowing why I did it?" When Rhodey glared at him, Tony didn't seem surprised. "I thought not. Can't blame me for trying, though. This isn't something I'm proud of, to say the least.

So I was mad, and I was violent and angry and I decided to break rules. I made the toilet overflow, let my spider-bot wreck up the living room, and broke into the liquor cabinet. I knew it was expensive and only for special times. I broke some of it, but then I tried some of it too. Ever heard of bubblegum schnapps? They don't burn like alcohol's supposed to. They tasted like candy. Bubblegum, mint, chocolate… It was good and I had a bunch of them. I didn't comprehend that schnapps [1] had the same alcohol as everything else in the cabinet did. I just thought it was expensive so it was in there alongside the other expensive drinks. I'm naïve in all the worst ways a human being can be, you know that, right? I may be able to program your toaster to sing Ave Maria, but I don't know anything about anything when it comes to the real world.

Angry drunk and stupid, I got into a big fight with my mom. A huge one. And then she said she wished she just had a good kid. And…" He inhaled, shutting his eyes as if to block out the memory, "I took a knife and I… I stabbed her. I cut her open to get to the baby and then I was going to kill it but there was blood everywhere and I sort of came to. As I held the stupid thing I realized what I'd done and I called my dad and 911 and then I just _sat there,_ Rhodey, with this screaming bloody baby in my arms and my mom dying on the floor and, and…" he was working himself into hysteria; he shuddered all over as he tried to reign himself in. "Then the paramedics got there and they thought I had been trying to help my mom deliver the baby, they didn't understand, and my dad came in and he asked me what happened. I smelled like schnapps. I was covered in blood. Mom was dead upon arrival at the hospital. It had all already gone to hell and back. Then I told him what happened.

He was either so furious he cried or so sad he started screaming or both. Everything's one big blur after that. I was never allowed to see my baby sister. She was given up for adoption so she'd be safe since my dad's money couldn't wave all the laws. Besides, I think he wanted her to go away to a nice safe home with normal parents and normal siblings so she wouldn't end up like me. He was so angry and he was so broken after everything that happened. Then he did something I still don't understand.

He forgave me. He got over it. And he shouldn't have. I don't deserve to be forgiven and be the heir to Stark International and be Iron Man. _I_ should've been the one he gave up for adoption, the monster who killed his own mother. I'm the one who's evil. I don't deserve to be living with you and having this great life after I destroyed someone else's altogether. I deserve to be in jail with all the other lifeless scumbags. I deserve to be raped and killed in prison like a common piece shit, I-"

Rhodey put a hand on Tony's shoulder. "Enough, Tony. I get it."

"No you don't!" Tony snapped, sudden anger and self hatred burning in his eyes. "I killed the person who meant the most to me, the one woman I loved more than life itself! I ruined my father's life and put him through Hell because I couldn't control my temper. Do you have any idea what it's like knowing you're capable of betraying and destroying everyone you love if you just mad enough? I'm a monster, no better than any of the people I'm fighting against. I'm a horrible, despicable excuse for a human being. I killed my _mother_, Rhodey. I can't put it in any more obvious or horrifying terms. Even Stane has never sunk this low in all his life and… it's just so hard, Rhodey, living with what I did. Every fight I'm fighting is just some way to try and make it right. I want to make my family's name shine, make sure my dad's remembered, and somehow some way make up with my sister. I want to undo everything I've done.

The problem is there's no undoing something so disgusting and degenerate. There's nothing I can ever say to her that will make up for what I did. There's nothing I can ever do that can really balance out my karma. The world may not know. The world might think everything's fine. I can even fool you and Pepper into thinking nothing was strange about my mom's death. But deep down I can't escape myself. I don't deserve to just be forgiven. I don't deserve to be loved and cherished by my father. He should've hated me and he should've thrown me out. I should've been the one who died in that plane crash so he and Rococo could've been a family. Better yet I shouldn't ever have been born and my mother and father could've had a long life together and better yet-"

"Tony," Rhodey shouted, "Stop it! You're just working yourself into a complete freak out. Now, stop sobbing and listen to me. What you did wasn't your fault." Tony let out a bark of disbelieving laughter. "I'm serious. You were drunk, you were an angry kid and you didn't _mean_ to kill your mother. You meant to kill your sister, which is bad, but I don't think you ever would've gone through with it. You couldn't even when you tried and you hated her. You can't kill, Tony. Not on purpose. Botching up a rudimentary C-section isn't the same as deliberately killing someone."

"Tell that to Rococo next time you see her, I'm sure that'll make it a lot easier to take being an orphan because of a psychotic older brother!" Tony shot back angrily. "I ruined two people's lives and whether I meant to or not I killed someone. I don't want everyone to make excuses for me, tell me it's okay and then move on. I don't want you to justify what I did, I want you to be sane about thing whole damn thing! You should hate me!"

Rhodey leapt to his feet, eyes narrowed. "Why, because you hate yourself? Would that make you feel better Tony, if everyone hated you for what you did? What would that accomplish in your little world? Would that make everything okay? Because to me it sounds like you're angry at yourself and the only one who holds any grudge against you is _you_. You really are your own worst enemy, you know that Tony?"

"But I…" he looked at his friend, clearly lost on his train of logic. "I killed someone. I'm evil."

"The world's not that black and white, Tony. You're not an evil hellion just because you hurt someone you care about. You were just a kid. You made mistakes. You still do. And while I can understand not wanting to do the same thing again, you're not going to be able to prevent it unless you get over this. You need to forgive yourself, you need to give yourself one more chance to do right. I know it's hard to stomach having done something so awful. It's like a big heavy weight on your shoulders. I can see it just when I talk to you. But Tony, I'm here. You can put some of that weight on me. We can talk, we can cry, whatever. Just don't stay stuck in this rut forever. Your mother wouldn't have wanted you to spend your whole life hating yourself."

Tony pulled his knees up to his chest and buried his head in them. "I deserve it," he murmured softly, "I deserve every punch the villains give me and every energy blast they throw at me. How can I forgive myself when I don't deserve it? I don't want to be told it's alright. I… I kind of _want_ to be punished for this, Rhodey. Does that make me weird?"

"No," Rhodey replied as he embraced him, "It makes you human."

* * *

[1] Author's Note: For those unfamiliar with schnapps, they are candy/fruit flavored alcoholic drinks with the same potency as beer (sometimes worse, sometimes better). They are carefully made not to burn like beer or vodka does going down. There's no sharp after taste like other alcoholic drinks have, either. New York City also consumes more schnapps in a quarter of a year than the rest of the USA. Due to being candy flavored, it's not uncommon for even twelve year olds to get into the schnapps not knowing it's alcoholic; after all, it doesn't taste like it.


	10. Self Forgiveness Is The Hardest

Author's Note: And here is where I felt the urge to do a church scene. I don't have a clue why. I'm not Christian. But I like the idea of a big huge aptly appropriate sermon being fired off at a single character; it's kind of like how I love it when the Coco Puffs bird tries to quit and there's operas, TV shows etc about Coco Puffs. Oh, and for those who don't get why I made Pepper Lutheran, it's because they're often stereotyped as calm, rational people. Please picture Pepper in that kind of church for a moment and you'll see why that's an awesome idea. A whole bunch of stoic, serious people… and Pepper. Trapped together in a small space. For _an hour_. God, I love being an author. XD

Well, that and this is sort of filler while I work on some more Pepper, Gene and Whitney centric chapters. I'm trying to keep the romance levels low even though I ended writing a chapter filled with Gene/Pepper (Genper? Pepene? What this ship's name, again?) subtext. For the record I actually prefer Rhodey/Pepper (again, I don't know their couple name) and Gene/Whitney (Geney? Whitene?) over other pairings, but I like all of them. The problem with liking all couplings is romantic tensions end up being written between _everyone_, which gets… awkward, to be kind.

* * *

_I tried to help you once, against my advice. I saw you going down but you never realized that you're drowning in the water, so I offered you my hand. I left my heart open, but you didn't understand._ – Scars by Papa Roach

_Can everybody kindly shut the fuck up and stop telling me it's okay? Because it's not and if you're cool with this then you're kind of evil. _- Comedian Jennifer Tarquin, referring to the incident in third grade where she broke another child's arm.

* * *

"Why are we here?" Tony asked Rhodey quietly. "I don't think someone like me should really be in a church like this."

Given that it was a mostly black church, this caught the attention of more than a few people. Rhodey raised an eyebrow. "You're not going to give me another lecture on how you deserve to go to Hell, are you?" he asked softly. "Now's not the time or place, man."

"Just something you should keep in mind," Tony replied with a shrug. "Especially since I recognize some of these people from school and they're all nice, normal, and, y'know, not _evil_."

"You're not evil, Tony. Hopefully Pastor Louis can make you understand that where I can't." Rhodey sighed and briefly closed his eyes. "Man, this is all such a big mess."

"That's a disturbingly nice way to put it," Tony shot back dryly. Then, seriously, he added, "I don't remember you ever inviting any of your other friends to church. I mean, I know Gene's a Buddhist, but he seems pretty open minded about religion. And Pepper's family is Lutheran, even if they don't go to church all that often. So…"

"I don't know Gene well enough to make that kind of an invitation, Tony. And I really, really don't think Pepper wants to go to any church but hers. She likes being able to run the lessons for younger kids and help them put on plays and all that stuff. She'd be bored here. God knows I love her, but let's face it, she couldn't hold still through a whole sermon if her life depended on it." Rhodey grinned fondly as he said it; Tony smirked because it was irrefutably true. "What about you and your dad? Knowing you two I'm gonna guess you'd work through Sunday altogether."

"We did," Tony confessed, smiling at the memory. "We'd work for so long we'd be surprised it was Monday because we thought it was Saturday. That's what three day long technology sprees will do to you. When we _did_ manage to remember we were always late, so we weren't exactly our pastor's favorite people. And I don't think we ever got through a service without having to leave early because my dad had some business thing to do."

"Oh, your pastor must've _loved_ you guys."

"Yeah, we were totally his faves. Especially after the whole exploding coffee machine thing I pulled when I was seven. They still haven't gotten the stains out of the wall. My dad was so proud that I managed to get the thing to fly with such basic implements… Good times, man. Good times."

Rhodey was about to ask for details of that particular story, as it sounded like the kind of thing church legends were made of, when the service itself started properly. Tony groaned at the singing and then spent the bulk of worship staring at Rhodey. "I didn't know you could sing," Tony whispered into his ear. "Do this in front of Pepper and she'd fall in love with you, man. Holy crap." Rhodey felt his face flush and tried to avoid looking directly at Tony through the next song; he caught the brunette's mischievous grin out of the corner of his eyes and fought the urge to snark back at him. Tony mouthed 'you've got a crush on Pepper' at him. Rhodey stepped rather pointedly on Tony's foot.

A few songs later, some announcements were made. And then the sermon started and Tony felt his heart begin to hammer in his chest. Well, he had that sensation every waking second since the accident, but this was different. This was one of those moments in his life where he was trapped in a room with someone who he really, really didn't want to listen to. Forgiveness. The sermon was about forgiveness and Rhodey had tricked him into coming and this was all planned and – breath, Stark, he told himself. Breathe. Beside him, Rhodey felt him tense up. He looked Tony over, taking in the emotions playing across the other boy's face. There was an acute mixture of anxiety in his eyes, but he didn't bolt for the door. He shot Rhodey an accusing glare that made the black boy wince apologetically.

"One of the problems we don't talk about much in Christianity is self-forgiveness. We talk a lot about feeling sorry for your actions and asking for forgiveness, and those _are_ important. But they're not any more important than forgiving yourself is. If you're still angry with yourself, every single person you know can forgive you and you'll still be miserable. If you can't let go of your mistake God's forgiveness won't put a dent in your sadness. Until you learn to forgive yourself you can't move on; you're stuck in that one moment, that one mistake, for the rest of your life. I'm not saying you should forget what happened or just act like nothing happened. We need to learn from our mistakes, we need to feel regret for what happened, but we need to move on. That's the problem with a lot of people, a lot of you sitting here today. How many times do we think we owe people something or do we do things out of guilt to make up for something they've forgiven us for? How many times do you get mad thinking about what you did years ago? I have news for you: you're not getting a do-over, so it's time to let it go.

Recently, a member of the church came to me with a problem." At this point, Tony gave Rhodey the kind of glare that could've frozen flames. Rhodey had a feeling this was probably the first and _last_ time his best friend would go to church with him. Pastor Louis continued, "This man's friend did something horrible. He committed a crime almost eight years ago and he has spent every day of his life hating himself for it. He hates being alive because he thinks he doesn't deserve it. And the forgiveness of his friends and family can't help him, because he's lived for so long with the guilt that he feels he deserves to be hated. This, to me, represents a wide spread but unspoken problem in the world: the inability to forgive one's self.

It's easier to forgive somebody else. You can think up excuses and motivations and reasons for what they did. You can be sympathetic and realize that we're all human and we all make mistakes. You can forgive them because you love them, they mean something to you. But forgiving yourself is a hundred times harder because most of us don't love our selves. Some of us are _in_ love with ourselves, but it's far more common to just sort of hate yourself. We wish we were smarter, more outgoing, more social, better looking. Statistically speaking most of us aren't very fond of being us. And so there's no excuse for our own failings. We can see that the other person was trying their best. We don't see that in our own lives. All we see is the errors, the failures to be perfect. 'Why do we always mess everything up?', we wonder. Then we spend the rest of our life thinking about what idiots and fools we were.

What I wish everyone would realize is that God created all men and women on this Earth equally. That means you are, at the end of the day, no worse or better than anyone else. That means logically you deserve the same forgiveness you give your family and friends. You're just like anyone else who made a mistake, and you need to forgive yourself as you would anyone else. When our brothers or our friends mess up we ask why and we tell them it's okay. We need to apply this to ourselves. The Bible doesn't say 'love and forgive everybody but you', it says to love everyone and forgive everyone. No exceptions. This includes _you_.

You are all wonderfully and fearfully created, with unique talents and gifts. We all have so much to offer the world, our thoughts, our love, our minds, and there isn't a person in this room who deserves to go to Hell." At this point, Tony muttered 'except me' under his breath and got a glare from Rhodey. "You are all good people, and if you were asked you'd forgive the person next to you, the person behind you, the stranger across the room. Why not yourself? You would not approve if someone else spent eight years kicking themselves over something, why do you think it's a good idea for you to do it? You need to love yourself as you love your neighbor.

Scientifically, we know that anger and hate are bad for the heart. Because of this, churches of all denominations have been telling people to forgive and not to hold grudges. Yet you'll never hear anyone say you need to stop being mad at yourself. Sometimes the church gets so hung up on forgiving other people and confessing sins and all that that we forget we're supposed to get over our sins. You are meant to feel bad for it and accept it was a mistake, but you aren't meant to hang on to your short comings forever Otherwise you're still and angry and hateful and that is still bad for your blood pressure, your immune system and your heart. Human beings were not designed to be angry; we shorten our lifespans and can kill ourselves through sustained anger and hate.

You aren't meant to live your life like this. You aren't meant to spend the next ten, twenty, thirty some years hating yourself. You are meant to live life in love and peace, and we run around singing 'let peace begin with me'. But peace can't begin with you until you make peace with yourself. Now, some of you may be saying you don't deserve forgiveness after what you've done. Maybe you did something horrible, maybe you're just holding yourself to an incredibly high standard. Either way you still deserve forgiveness. Everyone deserves a second chance, and a third, and a fourth and so on and so forth. Everyone deserves to be loved and love, to forgive and be forgiven. If you hold on to hate your life will slowly start to get worse, because hate is an addictive thing and it's very easy to take out even self-hatred on other people. Meanwhile as you're destroying your personal relationships your body is slowly breaking down-"

Tony had never run out of a church before. _First time for everything_, he thought dryly. The gravel crunched under his feet as he came to a skidding stop at the end of the parking lot, sensing rather than hearing Rhodey behind him. The brunette turned to face him with such emptiness in his eyes that any anger Rhodey had faded the second he saw him. A tense silence hung between them as they stared at each other, ice brown meeting blue-gray unflinchingly. For a moment, Tony seemed at a loss for words. Then he spoke, with such calm fury that Rhodey couldn't even respond.

"Why the hell did you do this to me, Rhodey? You told my greatest secret to some Bible-thumper, then you had him call me out in front of four hundred people. I can't _believe_ you would do something like this. I trusted you with information that could get me arrested and have Stark International be turned over to Stane permanently, and your immediate response was to go tell someone? What the hell?" Rhodey winced at the swear word, earning a glare from Tony. "Oh, yeah, like this isn't an appropriate moment to swear – my best friend decided to blab out something I've never told anyone else before to someone who then made an hour long _sermon_ about it!" He gestured toward the church angrily. "There's now an entire group of people who'll ask him what happened and I swear to God Rhodey, if anyone figures it out I will never speak to you again so long as I live. And do you know why? It's not that I'm ashamed of what I did, it's because then everyone will know I was enough of a sentimental dumbass to trust you with my secrets when you clearly can't keep them!"

"I just did it because I cared about you!" Rhodey shot back angrily. "I want to help you get through this! Maybe you need to stop being mad at me and start listening to what people are saying, Tony."

"I don't want your goddamn help! All you've done since day one is tell me how much I suck, whether it's the weapons or the revenge thing or how I act and now you've decided to enlist other people to tell me how I'm an idiot for not magically getting over this. Well, guess what Rhodey, _it didn't work!_ Now all you've done and make me feel like I'm defective or something for not just bouncing back from killing my mom. Oh, wait, that's not _all_ you've done, you've also jeopardized my entire future and my family's reputation at the same time. Wow, Rhodes, do you have to work at being such a horrible friend or does it come naturally?"

"Me?!" Rhodey yelled, clenching his fists and just barely restraining himself from throwing a punch, "I'm not the one who _went to Greenland_ last week without telling anyone!"

"I did that to protect you! But you wouldn't know about that, would you? You have no idea what it's like to have blood on your hands and to spend every second of every day trying to keep your friends from getting caught in the crossfire. You don't have a clue what it's like to know that you're capable of killing, to know you can end someone's life and to know those closest to you are in the most danger. Do you have any idea how hard it is to never let myself have a real friend, to keep away from every single girl who flirts with me, to turn down every single invitation to hang out? It's what I have to do just to keep everyone safe from me and it rips my heart out every single time because I don't want to be like this. I don't want to be dangerous and I never asked to be Iron Man, but now I have to be both at the same time and put up with you! Well you know what? I'm sick of you, I really am! You've just proven to me exactly why I never should've let anyone get close to me, because if I don't hurt them they hurt me!"

"I was trying to help!" Rhodey roared, putting harsh emphasis on 'help'. "I wasn't trying to get you to think you suck, I was trying to get it through to you that being angry is bad for you! You've already got a heart problem and now you're stressing yourself out all the time and I can't think that the alcohol was helping on that subject either-"

"I don't need you to save me from myself, Rhodey. This isn't some after school special." Tony took the opportunity to snort dismissively. "Not that you could help me even if you tried."

"You're right," Rhodey said softly, turning back towards the church, "You won't let yourself be saved."


	11. I Can Self Terminate

Author's Note: Forgive me. I started this fic out as a thing about alcohol and now it's a goddamn soap opera. Why anyone puts up with my melodramatic crap, I'll never know… But hey, at least I got around to writing Whitney's chapter, even if it is admittedly shorter than I'd like. Oh, and you all finally get to know why I changed the title of this fic to be half-Latin.

* * *

_I know, I should go. But I follow you like a man possessed, there's a traitor here beneath my breast. And it hurts me more than you've ever guessed. If my heart could beat, it would break my chest – but I can see you're unimpressed._ – Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the musical episode.

_I believe often that death is good medical treatment because it can achieve what all the medical advances and technology cannot achieve today, and that is stop the suffering of the patient. _– Christaan Barnard, cardiologist

* * *

Death.

What was it like to come so close to dying, to be clinically dead for a few precious moments? She'd done some reading and found it was mostly described as the ultimate peace, more than that a total lack of worry and pain. Elysium was the Latin term for it; a world without problems. It was bliss, it was falling and falling without ever stopping, it was a warm embrace sweetly sweeping away everything that was wrong with your life.

It was something Whitney thought about more often than she really should. She never let anyone know. No one would've cared even if she'd mentioned it. That was the problem with being so worthless; no one ever cared if she lived or died. No one ever would. So when she was truly feeling down, she pictured. She imagined. And she _planned_. Death was a beautiful thing, proof of a benevolent God. No one could argue that there was a devil and no God once they realized that death promised a wonderful escape for every single person on Earth. Truly there was something wonderful about that, miraculous in a strange sort of way.

Soon it would all be over. Soon she would finally go forward to where she was loved and cherished. Why she'd even been born, she didn't know. It had been a horrible mistake. No one wanted her to be alive. Her presence just weighed everyone down because they knew how pathetic she was deep down inside. Everyone could see how desperate for love and dead inside she was. She didn't even try to hide it anymore. Life was miserable no matter what she did; at this point she'd just sort of quit trying. She focused her energies on the release she was seeking.

These other people were ultimately right to hate her. Pepper's constant mockery was just one voice among many. Everyone in the world taunted her, mocked her, giggled over her. It was as if the world was telling her what a burden she was on them. She felt their glares acutely, and she couldn't be mad at them because they were right. Whitney was worthless as a spy, a failure as a daughter, a mediocre student and above all useless. She knew it, they knew it, everyone knew it from the day she was born. Some people were born to be great and some people were doing great to be born. She knew what category she fell into.

Peace. That was all she could ever hope for, the sweet embrace of death. She didn't want this anymore. She was so tired of all the hate and the mockery. Every day she just barely kept herself from breaking down in each and every class. Each second spent in the presence of other people was a test of endurance. Sometimes Whitney would cry at night, wishing someone else could take her place or she could go back in time and just never be born at all. Even her own father despised her. He'd rather be shot than be with her. There was no hope of fixing their relationship anymore, not after what had happened. She'd brought this all on herself, after all.

But it was okay. Everything was about to be okay. Soon everyone would get their wish and no one would have to put up with her anymore. Sniffing, she began to arrange the pills in front of her on her vanity. This had to be done properly, not like the botched attempt Stark had pulled. She would not fail now, not at this. It was too important. Whitney had calculated the necessary dosage of sleeping pills to kill herself and promptly obtained three times that amount. If she took the slowest acting ones first, followed by the fast acting ones, then she would be able to swallow all of it without passing out first. From there it would be easy to just slip under the covers and drift off to sleep forever.

"It's over," she whispered softly, tears spilling down her cheeks. "It's finally over."

There was no note. Her father wouldn't care about her death. He wouldn't even attend the funeral. Why should he? She wasn't important. He didn't care about what she had to say. He'd made it abundantly clear to her that she was less than nothing to him. Tony might be saddened by her death. Other than that she couldn't imagine anyone would even object to this. She was just the rich asshole, right? It wasn't like she was a good person or anything. She was rich and therefore evil because that was how the world worked. Whitney tried not to focus on all the rejection and pain as she pulled out the necessary bottles of water. It was time to really try her best to do this right. This was more important than love and rejection and all that. This was about peace.

_Everything's over,_ she thought as she began the slow process of consuming three hundred-odd pills. _It's all over. Never again, never again._ No more dodging thrown objects, no more being spat on, no more being yelled at and mocked. No more 'I'm too busy' and 'get out of my office'. No more Christmases and birthdays spent alone and without presents in a giant mansion where everything seemed cold and distant. The battle to endure this miserable existence was over. She was giving up; she willingly admitted she'd lost the fight and she was okay with that. In this life Whitney had tried to do her best and she'd failed. It was over. Time to admit defeat and go to sleep.

Two hundred pills later she wasn't finished but was too tired to go on. She flopped onto her bed and closed her eyes. _I'm so tired of being alive. I just can't take it anymore. I give up._ A smile crossed her face briefly. Giving up felt good, it really did. There was something beautiful about not having to put up with this garbage anymore. No more messing up all the time and making everyone's life harder. The fight was over. The battle had ended. Whitney could feel all consciousness slowly ebb away from her; she embraced it fully, letting herself drift away.

Everything was beautiful. She was free, she was free as a bird and everything bad was lifted away. The misery and pain were lifted from her. It was like a great weight had been taken from her and she breathed in deeply, treasuring the sensation. There were no more breaths to come, only rest. She had no one to answer to, no one to pretend for, no enemies to fight and tormentors to endure. The world of darkness engulfed her. She was drifting in a sea of blackness so pure it redefined darkness. All she could feel was warm. All she could see was perfect to her, a vision of loveliness and blessed silence. There was no one to hurt her as she rested. It was true rest, unmarred by thought or emotion, an existence of utter completion and wholeness. The world was like a gentle hug, a tender embrace, and Whitney felt she could spend eternity here and never tire of this incredible wholeness.

Somewhere on the borders of her consciousness there were flickers of light, of sounds and sensations. The drifting stopped and she lay on something solid, something moving. Still she did not return to the real world. That body was not hers. She was here, in this beautiful darkness that loved her so. The aches and pains of that blonde body barely registered as she chose not to move towards the light of awareness and consciousness. She was not going back to that world of hate and misery. She would never go back, no matter what. Here everything was perfect. Let that man who called himself father pay for her to lay asleep the rest of her life in a hospital bed. It didn't matter so long as she had this. She was never going back to that nightmarish existence. _I found Elysium, Daddy_, she thought deliriously. _I found it in my head. It was right there all along and I never knew it. Isn't that silly?_

_I guess this is what they mean by 'rest in peace'._


	12. Dyfunction Runs In The Family

Author's Notes: Oh, dear. I seem to have written myself into a bit of a corner. See, I promised no pairings, but on the other hand this has been my own personal canon for so long now that I can't unsee the subtext. And I know everyone else but me is going to be squicked by this and honestly I deserve flames at this point. How this fic evolved from 'Tony faces his inner demons' into 'dysfunction junction', I'll never know. Can I just say ahead of time that I'm sorry? I really never meant for this fic to become a giant tangled mess of stressed people, broken relationships and shattered dreams, but it has.

When a chapter with this kind of content is the uplifting redemption scene, as a writer you sort of know you've officially jumped the shark. And again I'm sorry that I'm springing this on my readers but I've had this plot bunny in my head for weeks and, um, well, did I mention I was sorry?

* * *

_I keep asking myself, wondering how. I keep closing my eyes but I can't block you out. Wanna fly to a place where it's just you and me, nobody else, so we can be free._

_I can try to pretend, I can try to forget, but it's driving me mad, going out of my head._

All The Things She Said by Tatu

* * *

Whitney lay as if in a coma.

She'd had her stomach pumped and a multitude of counteracting drugs had to be given to her via an IV, but she should've been up by now. After three days in the intensive care unit, her blood pressure and heart rate had finally stabilized. She'd flatlined three times as the sheer volume of the drugs she'd take forced her heart to stop beating altogether. It had been hours before they'd found her. The fact that she wasn't dead was nothing short of a very expensive medical miracle. Now she appeared to be sleeping through the effects of the last pills. At first they'd thought she had lost all brain activity from what happened, but they checked and she was still alright in that department.

There were still a number of drugs to administer to her. Her blood pressure was still low, though not lethally, and her heartbeat was irregular. She would likely spend the rest of her life on blood pressure medication once she woke up; the damage had been rather extensive. By some miracle she had only been dead a few minutes when she was found. Anything longer and she'd be brain damaged. From what they could tell she had laid there for hours simply asleep before the drugs had really entered the blood stream and started to shut her systems down. Though the oldest cliché of hospitals was that of a person riddled with tubes, all she had was an IV in her wrist. Aside from that, she lay as if asleep in her own bed, blissfully unaware of the world.

Her father filled out the paperwork and the forms, but did not visit for a week. When he did, he stood at the doorway of her room as if paralyzed. He had not noticed the thinness of his own child, the clear lack of nutrition. There was an old scar on her arm that he'd never known was there. She was foreign to him now, some kind of long lost relative he barely recognized. Her hair needed brushing and her skin had a lackluster dullness to it that was rather alarming. He moved slowly forward, as if she might wake up suddenly and be furious with him. Gingerly he reached out to touch her, pulling back abruptly at the last second. The irrational thought that he might hurt her more than he had already ran through his head, but he couldn't just stand here like a fool.

He had to get her back. He had to wake her up. Not for her sake, but for his own. He loved her. Stane winced as if the thought physically hurt him. He'd been a terrible father, pure and simple. He was a horrible, horrible person. She should hate him for this. Of course, she didn't. She was Whitney, the most devoted human being he'd ever known; where she got it from he couldn't imagine. He could never love someone with such intensity, and she certainly didn't get it from her two-timing, over-sexed mother. _How did two ugly people produce someone so pure hearted?_ He waved the thought away to focus on the here and now. He'd done enough over thinking and over-working in the past few months for a lifetime.

She had only stirred occasionally. If she was ever awake she certainly fooled all the nurses monitoring her; she laid in bed unmoving but for a small shift of position every so often. Hesitantly he reached out to push her hair out of her face. It was soft as silk and he pulled back his hand as if it burned. He'd forgotten how delicate his daughter was. She was the most determined person he'd ever know, yet the body that mind occupied was fragile as glass. For all the things she was capable of she was ultimately as vulnerable to pills as anyone else. The sight of her looking so dead was terrifying. This was Obadiah Stane's new personal definition of Hell. He saw all his failures as a family member and a basic human being reflected in her weak, near-lifeless body.

"Whit," he murmured softly. "Whit, please wake up."

As if she might break if he moved too quickly, he slowly took her free hand, the one without an IV, and clasped his hands around it. As if the medical equipment was lying to him, he instinctively checked her pulse. It was on the low end of okay, but it was there. Her skin was somewhat ashen from the lack of sunlight and the color made his stomach twist painfully. What had he done? This was his fault. He felt the inherent need to do more, to be affectionate, yet it had been so long he was lost on what to do, on how to do it. He watched her face closely. Her eyes had never been the sharp silver-white his were, yet neither had she inherited her mother's eyes. Whitney was a beautiful child born to average parents, a gift he'd ignored. He had never been the father showing off his pretty little girl, never the protective dad guarding her from boys.

Of course, that was the problem. She only wanted one man, _him_. And he hadn't just pulled away from that affection, he'd run for it. He'd desperately hoped she'd get over her 'I want to marry Daddy' stage. He'd tried to ignore it for so long he'd forced her out of his life entirely. She had invoked his wrath long ago simply by crossing the line between familial love and romance. He had never forgiven her for it. She knew it, he knew it and on some level he had to acknowledge he'd mishandled the whole thing. Whitney wouldn't be here if he'd just been a little calmer in his rejection, a little less resentful and grudge holding. He'd hated her for so long over this that she had finally crumbled under the pressure of having to make up for something that was beyond her control.

She loved him. He could not fathom why. He was a workaholic control freak who had a deep seated love of money. Why she treasured him enough to look past their blood relation, he had no idea. He couldn't fathom what he'd ever done to make her think he was good. He was a terrible father. Why she wanted him to be more than that, he'd never know. It was all so confusing to him, love and affection. He didn't know how to be mild, always an extremist in his thinking and by extension his feeling. When angry he was vicious, furious, sharp tongued and cruel. When happy he was joyous, loving, loud and friendly. There was no middle ground to him, and in his rejection of his daughter's off-kilter affections he hadn't sent the message 'I care about you but not that way', he'd sent the message 'I hate you'.

Undoing that message was impossible, because if they'd discussed it she surely would have challenged him with 'you started it', and then he'd lose the whole argument. It was his fault for being so ultra-affectionate and obsessive after her mother left. He'd meant only to comfort her. Instead somehow she'd fallen for him. They had spent two whole years trying to deal with the fallout, him by making an ass out of himself and her by desperately vying for his attention. Even though he'd cut through her with his words, she still loved him intently. The memory of those glorious days where they had been truly close still were fresh in her mind. Until she'd spoiled it all by opening her big mouth, they'd been true friends. He'd treated her as if she was an adult, like a co-worker, and so they had bonded so fast…

He'd never meant for it to end up like this. He never meant for this to happen. But his career, his money, his social reputation, his life – he couldn't put everything in jeopardy for the sake of a relationship. And furthermore he was a sick bastard if _that_ was his objection to this! Whatever happened to the line between romance and family? Why didn't that repulse him, why couldn't he just say he was honestly horrified by such an idea? Why did Whitney have to be so perfect, so soft spoken and intense and loving? He shouldn't even consider this for more than half a nanosecond. He shouldn't even have to think about it before saying no. So why was it he could never quite bring himself to come up with any reason against it besides 'it's illegal'? That spoke volumes about him, and it said nothing pleasant.

Sometimes he just wished he could run away to a place where there was no one to answer to, no laws to obey and standards to abide. Sometimes he envisioned a world, post apocalypse, where there was only the two of them. Only then could Obadiah Stane ever admit to the horrible weakness that was love, because then there was no one to judge him and hate him for it. He wished he didn't feel this way at all. He wished he could will it away entirely, wake up and be a normal father. He wished this wasn't his life, and, and…

And he wished he could just tell her he was _sorry_. He was so, so sorry for all this. This was all his fault. He never should've confided all his secrets in her, been her advisor and her soft place to fall when things got tough. Now her life was a wreck and it was all his fault. He never wanted to hurt her, he only wanted what was best for her. What he felt was wrong; he was a sick man and if he just kept her away he thought he might protect her from all the psychological ramifications of what they were feeling. Instead he'd only hurt her more, but what was he supposed to do? Every option was a terrible one, every way this could end would be bad. He'd done his best and failed. He'd failed so terribly that because of him she didn't even want to live anymore.

He'd had them turn off the security cameras while he visited. He did not want anyone to know that his true weakness was his daughter, that the proud and tough Obadiah Stane could be brought to tears just by the presence of a sixteen year old girl. He was grateful no one was here to see him staring at her like an idiot. He looked, he thought, as lost as he felt. Everything he knew about business and finance meant nothing right now. His degrees and money couldn't help him make this right. Whitney stirred slightly, turning onto her side. He pushed her hair away again and leaned down as if to kiss her. He pulled back abruptly as her eyes opened.

"Whit," he breathed, "Whitney Caroline Stane, you scared me half to death, I-" She closed her eyes as if to go back to sleep, and he pulled her upright by the wrists, careful to avoid the IV. Her eyes were hollow and empty, focused on some distant thing he couldn't comprehend. "Whit, please. Please forgive me, please. I'm so sorry, I really am… Oh, Whitney, it's all so hard. Everything's so complicated and I thought I was doing the right thing. Instead I just made it all worse." He wrapped his arms around her, drawing her close. "I'm so sorry, Whit."

She smelled like hospital linens and, faintly, of the lavender perfume she was so fond of. Her hair was still silken and distinctly inner lemon rind yellow. Were it not for these two things, he may as well have been holding a sack of potatoes; she did not move despite how unbearably uncomfortable she must have been. She did not so much as blink at his words, staring vacantly ahead. Fighting back tears for all he was worth, he broke the embrace to cup her face in his hands. She wasn't brain dead. Somewhere in there was Whitney, too hurt and tired to let herself come forward and be vulnerable again. This was all his fault, and he searched her eyes for a hint of hate, of love, of any emotion at all. He'd be okay if she hated him, because then she'd be awake. What he couldn't take was the silence. He wrapped his arms around her back to support her and yet she didn't react as if anyone was even there.

This was the final chance he was going to have at this, Obadiah realized suddenly. He had two options, to let the therapists and doctors handle it and quite possibly leave her like this forever, or to wake her up from all this so she could go back to what was clearly a miserable life. On the one hand, he couldn't let her live her whole life in a bed when she had a good sixty years left on her lifespan. On the other, if he snapped her out of this then everything from this point forward was his responsibility. Her sanity, her emotions, her very life was in his hands. And he'd already failed with her once. He'd already held her heart in his hands and he wasn't sure he deserved a second chance at this anymore. But he'd tried avoiding all this, and that was where the problems had all come from. Avoiding what they felt and doing what was right had nearly killed her. This was wrong. The right thing hadn't worked. He wanted to run. He stayed as if frozen in place.

"Please wake up," he whispered, sounding desperate and needy and all those things Obadiah the cold hearted business man Stane was not. "Please, Whit. I love you." He didn't even care anymore if someone thought that sounded weird because even he didn't know what way he meant it anymore, he just wanted his daughter back.

Two weak, shaking arms wrapped around him, and he thought he heard 'I love you too' whispered back before her lips pressed against his.


	13. Believing In Beer

Author's Notes: Obadiah/Whitney is either Obaney or Whidiah. I can't decide, but since I'm the only human being on the planet who would ever write such a thing, I suppose it doesn't ultimately matter much. But at least now when I'm writing Tony-angst and alcoholism, you know why Whitney isn't appearing – she's, uh, otherwise engaged, if you'll pardon the little romantic pun there. I'm not trying to write her out of existence or anything, it's just that she's always struck me as being three seconds away from a total breakdown. And if I can speak in my own defense, let's face it: incest might actually be a redeeming character trait in this case, with what an utter asshole Obadiah Stane is. My twisted little idea might not be legal, but is a heartless dad who just doesn't give a damn really any better? (Also, am I the only one disturbed by how well my theory explains Whitney's overly obsessive actions? Seriously, I will _not_ be able to watch scenes with her anymore without thinking about this.)

Anyway, we now return to our regularly scheduled alcoholism-centric program. Fun fact: Gene in this chapter is based off my best friend in middle school, and any and all mentions of how to hide alcohol in this chapter are all also based off that same seventh grader's amazing ability to work around the school's rules. And Tony's behavior here is based off of something that said friend pulled on me during his rehab. Except, you know, we weren't secretly crime fighters/wielders of ancient Mandarin artifacts. XD

* * *

_I exercise extreme self control. I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast. Hey, everybody has to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer._ – W.C. Fields, comedian

_I've never had much of a use for the concept of Hell, but if it exists, I'm in it. The same images running through my head over and over. I was there. I saw my mother's death. A buried memory all these years. It climbed inside me that day and it's been with me ever since, my Dark Passenger._ – Dexter Morgan, Showtime's Dexter, episode 11

* * *

"Gene, I need beer" were the first words out of Tony's mouth when he entered the other boy's home unannounced.

"Two things, Stark," the Chinese boy said in that sneering tone he was so fond of. "One, what makes you think I'd give a recovering alcoholic beer? Two, what makes you think I have alcohol? And most importantly, three: Why the heck would I keep beer on me where anyone could happen upon it? Do you think I _want_ to get arrested?"

"I'll answer those in the exact order you asked. One, because if you don't give it me I'll just end up drunk somewhere else where I might die alone of alcohol poisoning, and you're not enough of a jerkass to let that happen. Two, I can smell the orange schnapps you bring to school in your thermos whenever I walk by your locker – real subtle, by the way – and I doubt you're buying it on school grounds, 'cause no one else drinks it in our whole school but you. Three, if you're bringing it to school you probably have a stash on you at all times. And four, no, you don't want to get arrested, but you don't want me to end up drunk on the streets a little bit _more_ than you don't want to get arrested."

Gene gaped at him for a moment. "You… Tony, did you tell anyone?"

Tony shook his head. "No. I figure you've got your problem under control, so it's okay. But I don't know how to put down the stuff after a couple, Gene. That's why I need you to help me."

"Stark, I am _not_ giving you alcohol. Drinking isn't some skill you can learn after a couple of lessons, you either know how to control it or you don't." Gene's topaz colored eyes locked with his storm-blue ones as Tony opened his mouth to protest. "And don't even _try_ to threaten me. I drink too, remember? I can get Rhodey and Pepper together and raid your room until every last drop of alcohol is gone and every empty bottle is in the capable hands of your therapist."

If this did anything to deter the already rather drunk-looking Tony, it didn't show on his face. The Mandarin Chinese boy wrinkled his nose at the smell. It just smelled like beer, which was far from the worst thing he could've had, but the fact that he'd had at least one stash that no one had found was alarming. _I am __**so**__ telling Rhodes about this,_ Gene thought, smirking to himself. _The second you look away, your ass is mine._ Tony glared at him as if reading his thoughts and muttered something Gene didn't catch before speaking to him directly.

"You can't tell me when not to drink, Gene. You're just as bad as I am in a different way," Tony pointed out, sounding rather annoyed. "It's just plain hypocritical for someone who's got vodka in his backpack and schnapps in his locker to try and tell me that I shouldn't be having any. Name me the last day you went without drinking, and you don't even have the trauma I do as an excuse-"

"Don't bring my life into this," Gene warned, his eyes narrowing to dangerous slits. "You have no _idea_ what's happened to me. I've been to hell and back and now I need a little help to keep from being depressed, to keep me okay. But you? You're the one who's got an actual life-threatening problem, Stark, and I'm not going to have any more blood on my hands than I already do. I am _not_ giving you so much as an ounce of alcohol, because you don't use it like I do."

"Like a crutch?" Tony shot back, slurring his words slightly. "Like a shield?"

"Like a _helper_, Tony. It's a boost to me, like an energy drink. It's nothing I can't handle. But you don't know how to just get a damn sip in between classes and move on. If you had in your locker what I had in mine, you'd need a refill daily. I need a refill once a week. There's a difference."

"The therapists at most hospitals won't see it that way."

"Are you _threatening_ me, Stark?" Gene sounded more amused at this than anything. "You really think you're going to threaten me into giving you this? This is your ace in the hole?"

"Gene, I'm going to go outside, dial 911 on my cell phone, and there's no way you can get rid of everything in time before the cops arrive. They'll find you huddled in the bathroom flushing your stash, and then I'll tell them you gave me what I'm drunk on. That's underage drinking, selling alcohol without a license and endangerment of a minor right there." Tony grinned, although whether it was drunkenly or triumphantly Gene wasn't sure. "So give me something, Gene. I need a little break from reality, I just need a break, okay? I'm not after everything, just something to make it all easier. You can't get mad at me for that when that's exactly what you do, so you're morally obligated to gimme stuff!"

Gene mentally upgraded Tony from 'just a few beers' status to 'many beers'. He was clearly drunk enough to think this was a good idea, his words were slurred and he was rocking slightly on his feet. Granted, Tony was still more intelligent drunk than most people were sober, but Gene was not the idiot Tony apparently took him for. Calmly, Gene smoothed back his hair with one hands, and had the audacity to yawn during Tony's speech. He exhaled on his glasses and rubbed the spots off idly before turning to Tony and smiling a very unsettling, superior kind of smile that was more at home on the face of a murderer than a friend.

"Done rambling? Good." The Chinese boy smirked, crossing his arms victoriously. "I've got news for you: I'm not going to be pushed around by your addiction and I'm completely sober right now, which means I can out-gambit you in a heartbeat. If you even try to call in the cops, I've already got an alibi. I'll tell them I was hiding your stash. I'll cry, I'll be ashamed, and I'll hand over everything. The worst I'll get is sent to group therapy with you for a few sessions, but you? You'll be sent to an underage rehab center if they find out you were drinking so soon after your release as an outpatient. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get out of one of those, Tony? They are required by law to keep you for three months minimum. I want you to consider that very, very seriously before you dial that number, because once you do you've secured a spot in there."

"But you're an alcoholic too!" Tony exploded angrily, throwing his hands up in the air. "You're just like me! We've both got some issues and we're both trying to drink it away-"

"No, _you_ are the one trying that little piece of stupidity," Gene shot back coldly, thinking in the back of his mind what a stupid old timey phrase 'drink it away' was. "I'm working through my problems. I'm not just getting over them, I'm conquering them. Maybe you should stop living in denial and start facing things, Tony. Just a thought."

"Like it's so easy to just face everything? For someone who just pulled the 'you don't know what I've been through' card, you're a real monster, Gene."

The creepy thing, Tony thought, was that he didn't deny the accusation. He raised one eyebrow as if impressed by this deduction, and he smirked. Something in his eyes sent shivers down Tony's spine. These was something there, a dark passenger all too similar to Tony's own. He was reminded of the coldness in the eyes of those he fought, that indescribable ice that coated the very being of murderers who made the news. There was no physical change, no difference in the golden topaz color itself. But he saw beneath the surface of Gene, and what he saw was someone who was a darker version of himself, an evil inversion of what Tony was.

Hadn't it always been there, though? He had always sensed the anger lurking beneath Gene's surface, yet he and Tony handled that same anger differently. Gene was always just a little bit more restrained, too controlled to let himself explode or put it on display. He used alcohol in the same way, tightly regulating himself in a way that was almost inhuman. Where was the lapse of judgment, the mistakes every alcohol user made? Only a sociopath had such control – Tony's eyes went wide. Gene was a more distant and emotionally toned down version of himself. He was always running parallel to Tony in personality and in drive. Yet he was always a little less emotional, a little less loving, just a tinge too impersonal. Rhodey had pinged Gene early on as having something wrong with him. Tony had been offended because on some level he wasn't willing to recognize that people had inner darkness; he preferred to trust people at face value.

But if Rhodey was right, and Rhodey always was, then that meant Gene was more than capable of murder. Tony's storm-colored eyes narrowed and his faked rocking stopped altogether. He wasn't drunk. He hadn't had a drink since he got released from the hospital. He had only been trying to see if Gene would break, if he was someone Tony would have to avoid in the recovery process. Somehow in doing so he'd stumbled into Gene's dark side. There was no love and friendship fueled anger at his request for alcohol. There was condescension, sneering, arrogance, holier-than-thou superiority, and yet there was no alarm. Instead he'd turned on Tony and threatened him. No trying to talk him out of it based on how wrong it was or what an addiction it was, just a twisted train of logic that said 'you've got a problem, I don't, so I _deserve_ the alcohol more than you do'. And that was quite telling.

Cold. Lack of reaction. Threatening. Arrogant. The key traits of a sociopath. Suddenly Tony felt acutely aware of the fact that no one knew he was here. Uneasy, he turned to leave, throwing a convincing death glare behind his back and muttering some profanity for full effect. _This was a bad idea. I was better off not knowing that Gene's totally happy being an addict, and I really, really was better off not knowing how…_ He struggled for a word, even internally. Dark? Twisted? Off-kilter? All of the above? Tony suppressed a shudder as he opened the door, not warmed in the least by the sun. _No one else I know would act like this if I asked them for alcohol. Not even the dealers act like this, this is just… this isn't right._

"You're a monster, Gene," he muttered under his breath again, thinking the other boy couldn't hear. Behind him, the Chinese boy snorted dismissively.

"Stark, you have no idea what I am."


	14. The Sliding Scale Of Villains And Heroes

_Me, to my older brother:_ I don't know how to write Gene anymore! He's somewhere in between anti-hero, anti-villain and sociopath but I don't know where!

_My brother:_ I don't think _Gene_ knows what he is anymore. Why don't you write that?

And then I did. He was being sarcastic, but my brother is a fountain of ideas sometimes. Also, let's face it: Classifying Gene on the TV Tropes Sliding Scale of Heroes and Villains is really, really hard. He meets the definiton of a large portion of different types of hero and villain even before you throw in the abuse I put in his backstory. Then the season finale of Iron Man (which we'll get to in due time, I promise) just made it even worse. Dammit, Gene, stop being so complex! This fanfic has enough of that as it is! XD

* * *

_Remember that mook, or the victim you'd been abusing ever since you and he met? He's got a knife and no shame about stabbing you in the back. His motive is not heroic, generally being revenge. But your only control was fear, and when he's no longer afraid…_ - The TV Tropes article describing The Dog Bites Back, cut down to the most basic definition

_Revenge is the fire that consumes without compunction or conscience. Nobody is safe from a man with revenge in his eyes and rage enshrouding his heart._ – C. Allison, writer

* * *

I have slipped too far to turn back. That's all well and good, because I don't want to.

The memories still haunt me in the dead of night. The nightmares I see reflected back at me in every single surface with a shine to it, my mother's screams I hear in everything from the wind to the damn doorbell. Every time I inhale I taste blood. Each time I get into a fight all the hate and pain comes back fresh as if it were only yesterday and I get so angry I can't cry, can't smile, can only _hate_. It used to frighten me, this state of mind. But over time I stayed in the darkness so long my eyes adjusted and I could see.

I see the bloody burns on my arm my step father gave me. I see the scars that will be with me until I die, the pain that will awake me without fail each night. In these things I see the truth, the true truth of how hated and unwanted I am, how close I've come to dying. If he could only have gotten away with it I would already be dead. He despises me. Fair enough, because I will kill him. I will do it when I have humiliated him, made him understand that he did not break me. He broke part of me, the part of me that was weak and sentimental. But all he did was awaken the sleeping dragon within me. Rage is my water, I feed on hate and determination is what I breathe.

He tried to erase my memories, confuse me as to what the truth was. What he didn't realize was that it was all more fuel to the fire. I will not be broken, I will not quit. I cannot even consider failure as an option. And though I know my mother the Buddhist would cry at how I am, with all due respect the rules of the game have changed since Buddha's time. Maybe his teachings work well for everyday people, in normal situations, but this is different than anything he could ever have imagine. I was cornered, hated, and abused until I snapped. When I did it was like a switch was thrown. Now no amount of good and logical advice can throw the switch back. I've already crossed that line between damnation and salvation, murder. I had no choice, not really.

Each time it gets a little easier. Each time the guilt sudsided faster until it left me entirely. Every time I got a little bit better, learned more about how to take a life. To save my own life and that of my friends I will not hesitate to do the unthinkable. It's just so impersonal when you don't know the person in question. They mean nothing. On some level my mind recognizes that they had family, friends and dreams, but the part of my mind that is sympathetic and caring is not the portion in control right now. The part of my mind that dominates me is that portion that wants revenge at all costs and assures me it's quite logical that anyone who gets in the way must be silenced permanently. I listen to that part of me, I think over it whenever I have doubts about all this.

There's a part of me that begs for me to stop. He's almost like a separate entity, another person from another life. Before I was treated like trash for so long, that merciful part of me made sense. Now he's just an outdated part in a modern machine. There will always be time for regrets after the whole thing is over. I can spend the rest of my life mourning the losses of human life once I've succeeded, because once you've won you can spend forever looking over the past. This is not the time for such things. This is time for action and the part of me that is still merciful cannot comprehend that. But I comprehend it, I know it, I live it. As surely as the sun rises I know that every daily task I face has to be carefully executed. I will live a life designed, created and engineered around revenge. Once that's been achieved I will breathe again, I will feel things like a normal person and life will return to some semblance of normal.

I do not feel, so I cannot regret my actions. I don't feel, so I can't cry, sob hysterically and mourn the loss of my blood parents. I don't feel anything for so much of the time that I've begun to live for those brief few moments of hate. Ever since the first hit, the first slap, I shut down everything within me. The entire world seems fake, and that's why I can do these horrifying things, because it's all not real to me. Nothing is unless I've had enough alcohol that I can get angry. I keep it in my locker and on me at all times. I've come to hate and fear the numbness in ways no normal sane person can imagine. The world is so dull, gray, apathetic and meaningless, so without purpose. Everything, every moment is painfully empty and a dark reminder of the past. I wish I could say it hurts me. It doesn't, not at all.

The more intense the Zheng's abuse got, the more and more everything fell apart. Nowadays it's all worhtless to me, as hollow and fake as a movie. That voice begging me to stop has gotten quieter and quieter with time. Soon there will be nothing to me, no emotions, hopes or dreams, only hate and revenge. Those words get uttered like curses. They are my salvation. They are my only hope of ever making things right. People have died, blood has been spilled, lives have been ruined because ultimately these things will lead to revenge. Revenge for the beatings, the burnings, the hate that made my childhood a nightmare from which there was no waking. He ripped emotions out of me alongside my dignity and basic human decency. He treated me like I was sub-human for so long that I believed it. Unfortunately for him that meant that human morals meant nothing to me. Those are someone else's standards, the mad ramblings of people with too much emotion to commit crimes.

I envy them, normal people. Sane people. Even people like Stark that seem to be on the edge between insanity and sanity have more emotions than I do, more life. They live, truly live. I just exist. I survive. I lay in wait, planning the day Zheng will be dead and I will no longer be haunted by the memories of the past. When he is gone I'll be able to breathe again, to really be alive. One day the sunlight won't be cold on my skin and the sky will be blue to me. I was broken down to the point where I almost died mentally. My spirit was nearly destroyed by the madman I'm forced to call father. So now I find myself playing a part in a play where none of the actors mean anything at all to me. I go through the motions needed to get to the end of this insane game, where sweet release from all this lays in wait.

Feelings are a strange thing. With them I would never be able to do any of this. I live as if in a permanent stage of shock, not feeling or even truly seeing what's right in front of me. Alcohol makes it easy to get mad and yet even that emotion fades without aid. Somedays I feel as if I'm sleepwalking through my own life. These crimes and fights are the actions of some strange character in a play I'm reading, and I don't care about right and wrong, I just want the bad guy to die. For once in my life I want the evil man to die. I want to be safe. I want to be powerful enough to be safe so that I can feel, truly feel things like I'm meant to.

These darker emotions aren't the same as being normal. It's not the same thing, hating like I do and being normal. A normal person feels things that are as foreign to me as Chinese is to Stark. Happiness, contentment, love, peace. I'm just trying to obtain my peace through any means necessary. All I want is to be able to go to bed without being haunted by nightmarish visions. I want to know I haven't failed my family as the rightful heir to the rings. I want to know that no one dear to me can ever be killed and go unavenged ever again. Most of all I want these things to go away. The dark thoughts that swirl in my head have driven me to do things I know intellectually are wrond and yet emotionally couldn't care less about. With time this sick and twisted desire to see those who have hurt me in pain will become unchecked. I can drink to feel, I can stop to shut everything off, but always, always the ideas are present.

To kill is an exceptionally easy task. The main artery in the neck is the quickest way to end it, although they say you don't feel explosions and freezing to death feels quite warm in the final seconds. Me, I don't prefer extravagant methods. I silence those who know a little too much about the rings, then I move on. But even trying to be nice about it, it still intoxicates me. It's an incredible thing to do, a surreal action so foreign and cinematic you scarcely believe it's real even as you're doing it. It is the ultimate disconnect from reality. Once you've ended someone's life you will never, ever like yourself again. You become an abomination in your own eyes, a freak you can't stand, so in a way I suppose my internal apathy is a gift. Without it I would never be able to do any of this. That also means that once I have my revenge and everything returns to normal, I am going to hate myself.

But for now I haven't woken up. I'm still in that dreamy state where hate is all that matters. I still exist halfway in and out of reality, remembering all too well the things that have happened to me, to my family. For the sake of my own sanity I have to make everything right and there's no other way to do that. I can't let Zheng run around acting as if he's the rightful ring holder, and I can't let him get ahold of those rings because I know what he'd do with them if he did. If he kills me in civillian form, he gets arrested. If the Mandarin kills me in public at the height of his power it's an awful tragedy. The only reason he never did so earlier was because I never gave him the chance; I hid, I ran, I waited and I made it hard. Yet for all his denial that he was a murderer, I could see it in his eyes that I was on his list. My saving grace is that I remember the beatings too well to trust him and I stabbed him in the back before he could do so to me.

My world revolves around me. Not out of selfishness, not out of greed, but out of sheer survival instinct. The first obligation of any living organism to live. The second is to be safe. These two primal urges, as ancient as China itself, are what drive me every waking second of my life. That is why I could not let Tony leech from me my resources. To him alcohol is a crutch, something to lean on and a comfort that washes over him whenever he decides he needs it. To me it is a boost, a weapon. Just like everything around me, I must treat it only as a tool and I will not hand out my tools to everyone so they can be used against me. If anyone found out I would end up in a treatment center. I cannot allow that to happen. I have a mission, a driving purpose that restricts my actions entirely. To make mistakes now, at this critical juncture, would be absolutely stupid.

This isn't me, a part of my mind argues. This isn't you, the real you is the soft hearted boy who laughs with his friends and watches Chinese soap operas at night. And maybe it is. I don't know which part of me is a mask anymore, I don't know when I'm acting a part or when I really feel something. I've been putting up masks and walls for so long that I've lost track of who and what I am beneath all of it. Is the real me the one who slits a man's throat to silence him or the one who holds Pepper as she cries? The answer is simply that I am somehow both these people and neither. I am whatever the situation at hand requires me to be. I am evil, I am good. I am loving, I will kill you. I am loyal and I am a betrayer. I am all the parts I've played. They say if you fake things long enough it becomes your truth. There's all kinds of studies into the subject that show you can make yourself more confident, violent, patient and anything else you desire simply by acting like a character with those traits.

What this means for me, I'm not sure. The real me is one of these personas that I slip on, but which one? Which is me? Is it Jian Kaan, the small scared Chinese boy who loved his mommy with all his heart? Is it the Mandarin, whose single minded quest for the rings leaves no room for any other thought? Is it Gene Khan, the snarky semi-alcoholic with the cool clothes and the small circle of friends? And what about this me I can hear thinking right here and now? Is he the real me, or a section of my many personas that just happens to be dominant right now? I need a drink. I won't go get one because I do _not_ have a problem with alcohol and I am perfectly in control in all my forms, but I want one. The problem is that it doesn't numb me, it just makes it all more vivid. That's the last thing I want right now. All I want is for all this to be over. I want to have the rings so I can put the Mandarin persona away and kill Zheng so the crying little boy I one was will be satiated. Maybe then I'll be able to find the real me in this pile of masks.

Maybe. But I doubt it.


	15. Self Hatred In Spades And Spirals

_I wish someone would just turn me off and fix me._ – Johnny, from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac

_Self harm, via alcohol, drugs or other means, is the coping mechanism turned to when the pain in life exceeds the person's capability of handling that pain. This fact readily applies equally to guilt, grief, and depression. _ – Psychology In Modules (the book my college Psychology class uses)

* * *

He's just punishing himself.

He's just trying to atone for the monstrosity that he is. He hates himself, he really does. He doesn't like being Tony Stark. Iron Man is much easier to be, because Iron Man can save the world and be home in time for dinner. Iron Man doesn't have blood on his hands and Iron Man doesn't hurt the people he loves. Those are the traits of the worthless piece of shit that is Tony Stark. Tony Stark is a worthless, socially inept jerk who murdered for no real reason. Iron Man is the solution to the problem. The problem is Tony.

This is insanity, pushing himself this hard. But it's what he deserves. After what he did he shouldn't ever take a break from fighting the good fight again. He's not a good person, he's a monster and every person he looks at is a reminder of that fact, even snarky and level headed Gene. In the eyes and personality of each person around him there is the constant reminder that he's a failure. He has let down everyone who ever mattered to him. For what he's done he will not rest until everything's okay. He has to save those lives, fight those people, look for those rings. He had to make up for what he's done, because no Bible wielding pastor can ever make the truth go away.

The truth is he wishes he had died that night, he looks at the forming scar on his arm and sees only a missed opportunity. He's torn between the need to suffer for what he's done, the desire to end it all and the possibility, however slim, that maybe he's being too hard on himself. He dismisses that possibility every time it pops into his head. For what he's done he will never, ever have suffered enough to make up for it. He needs to save lives and fight these battles for her. Not his mother. She went to her death hating him and he deserves it. He earned it. He knows one day he'll die, go to Hell and he'll be fine with that because he couldn't stand being in Heaven with his parents. He doesn't deserve it.

Tony fights because somewhere out in this city, this sea of people, is his sister. And he ruined her life with what an angry, out of control drunk he was. The fear that she might be a casualty of one of these crazy battles is very real. She thankfully doesn't know what a disgusting, twisted freak her brother is. She will never have to know why she lives with adopted parents. The files say mommy died giving birth. There's nothing about her father. She would still get the company if Tony was dead when she was eighteen, but that's years away. Even though she deserves the riches that would bring far more than Tony does and it's tempting to die and let it go to her, at the same time he realizes that's years away. Until then he'll have to be the hero despite having the heart of a monster. A wolf in sheep's clothing, the world will never know that Iron Man is secretly evil and Rococo will never know her brother was either a hero or a villain.

Lying is the only thing that will save him now. The truth does not set him free. It haunts him every night. Even when he was the only living person with this knowledge, even when there were no legal consequences and no friends to stare at him in horror, he _knew_ deep down inside him what happened. People can be bribed, things can be deliberately forgotten, but he can't get what he did out of his head. He's never going to get over this. This isn't some petty crime that he can shrug off and blame on the alcohol, this is murder and there is no excuse. There is no excuse, and it's killed his relationship with Rhodey for the moment, so clearly there's also no one who will take this news well. Fair enough, given that what he did was the very definition of evil. That's why no one can ever know.

They don't understand. They try to lie to him, tell him it's okay. This isn't okay. What he did is not excusable, it's not justifiable, it's not even comprehensible to most ordinary people. Sane people can barely grasp the full horror of the atrocity he committed, so they say it's understandable. They'll try to put him into even more intense therapy and the therapist will try and justify his actions to him. If anyone knew they would try to gloss over what he did until he got over it. He doesn't want to get over it. Anyone who gets over this kind of thing is a monster worse than him. What he did is unforgivable. He wishes everyone would understand that and just yell at him already.

Since no one is being intelligent about this but him, he lies. Rococo will never know anything but lies about her origin, will never know the whole truth about her family. It's good for her. It keeps her safe. Pepper will never know why Tony hates himself, the reason he works himself half to death and drinks until it's all okay. If she ever knew she'd hate him. He couldn't take that. Pepper is special to him. His conscious mind won't admit she's more than a friend because Tony doesn't believe someone as worthless as him deserves to love and be loved in return. Deep down he recognizes that her hate would be too much to take, a hot arrow through his heart, and he's too broken as it is. Rhodey's mother can't know because she's always been like Tony's second mother. She is the one he loves and yet avoids like a plague. He doesn't want to hurt her too, he's terrified he'll end up killing her, he can't even show a hint of emotion in her presence. Being good to her won't bring his mother back, but it helps.

Lies are his shield. If he lies enough then no one else will ever have to know. No one can ever learn that nice, flirty, snarky Tony Stark is evil. That's why he will cry, he will yell, rant, kick himself, drink, and pick fights even with his friends. That way no one will like him enough to get close enough to learn the truth. This way they will only see Iron Man, protector of people and hero. Iron Man is different from Tony Stark. Tony will never be able to make up for what he did and Iron Man will. With enough time he knows that one day he'll look at the people he's saved, the city he's protected and he'll be karmatically even. Until that day he cannot rest, can't even try to slow down, give himself a break or drink ever again.

Sometimes he gets the urge to, make no mistake. It consumes him, how free and open alcohol makes him. It hurts going down. It hurts afterward. The punishment burns through him like a much deserved dose of fire, and then he can cry like a normal person. Under the influence he can finally admit to himself that without his dad he's a wreck. He misses him so much, the guiding light and ever forgiving guardian who kept him from self-destructing. Without his father he's a mess of guilt, pain and hate that he can't vent to anyone – no one compares to his father in the listening department. The unconditional love was overwhelming because it seemed there was nothing in the world that he could not understand and forgive. The blessing and curse of alcohol is that it lets him grieve while ultimately giving him more problems than it solves.

Still, he slips. He just wants it to be okay, he just wants to cry this out for a while. The familiar pain is a beautiful comfort, an old friend he missed desperately. Just like every time before the tears flow freely once he's got enough in his system. As it always has, it soothes him so that he can sleep. He lays on his bed half in and out of consciousness in a world of grief and shame that is uniquely his own. Everything's so hard. How much death is one person supposed to take? He wishes that someone would call him bad and hate him so that he could admit it. He needs someone to despise him because until that happens this is the only way the pain, grief, anger and hatred are ever going to surface. This is his own personal therapy. Forget that hospital therapist and all her positivity, he knows he's neither good nor worthy of saving. Privately Tony thinks they should just let him die of alcohol poisoning and Rhodey can take up the damn suit.

Everything hurts so much. Life isn't meant to be like this, is it? Life isn't meant to be so unbearable all the time and it wasn't before his dad died. But with him all hope within Tony died too. Now every waking second seems either meaningless, forced, stressful, painful or everything at once. His mind's been a hurricane of emotion ever since his dad died, then he had to go reopen old wounds and drag Rhodey into this. Why does every day have to be so hard? His life is growing too be too much to take, too much to handle. He's getting sick of trying to keep it together. The only thing keeping him alive is the knowledge he doesn't deserve to die and not have to deal with this.

Self hatred. He's so sick of it, he really is. He doesn't want to spend all his time thinking what an idiot he is. He wants to believe Rhodey when the black boy tells him he's a good person who made a mistake. If only he could just somehow let this go maybe this load on his shoulders would lighten, but he'd still be left with the void in his heart where his father used to be. It's all cold and empty without him. Even when he's okay with himself he's still hurting. He puts up a tough front so no one will see that under that there's nothing. There is no real Tony Stark under the mask, just a broken child riddled with grief and despair, the kind of person no one could ever admire or even like. If he can't like himself after all this time living with this insane life, how could anyone else ever want to be around him, the real him? People can barely tolerate the messed up Tony they see. The real, true Tony would repulse them.

He's drunk. It's nice to be able to cry and blame it on the drink. He missed it, this pain and warmth all over; it was such a wonderful thing when he first stumbled onto it. If his father hadn't been there for him he'd have been an alcoholic as early as possible. Any guilt he feels for breaking his promise not to end up like this is ignorable with enough effort. His father was an optimist who thought his son was a bright and wonderful person with a great future. His father didn't realize what a pathetic, horrible person Tony was. Good and wonderful people like his father couldn't comprehend something as low, sad and cliché as addiction. _My father always believed everybody could be helped. He didn't realize that most of the people in charge of helping me aren't nearly as good as he was._

Those jerks at the psuedo-AA program the hospital runs won't hear about this. He will probably tell his therapist, but those group leaders in the recovery units don't care about him at all. He wonders vaguely if he should be offended. Mostly he just can't bring himself to even try to give this up and on some level it offends him no one questions him on his alcohol use. It's like they gave up on him quitting before he did. Given that he gave up on quitting after five days out of the hospital, this says a lot about the hospital's staff standards. Whatever. He doesn't want to get over this. This is really good, it feels good in a way they can't ever understand. In a word, it's freeing. He feels free to feel and express everything. It's beautiful. In this moment he's okay being Tony Stark. He's wonderfully drunk so that he can't think about the past, the pain and the grief, he just stares at the ceiling with increasingly heavy eyelids. When he slips into sleep, he's neither nor happy nor sad, just devoid of emotion and warmly content all over.

It's the best he's felt all week.


	16. Outside Looking In

Author's Note: Forgive the shortness of this chapter. I just wanted to get some of Rhodey's POV into this fic.

* * *

_Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer._ – Oscar Wilde

_I have nightmares now of…of what I've done. The terrible things. I go to sleep and I see Z and…oh god, Goggles, what I did, it makes me sick. I, I cut off her fingers. And her toes. And then I tore off…and I, I cut pieces of flesh out…and I, I cut her open and…and burned her with acid and cut at her face and oh god, __what's wrong with me__?!_ – Linkara, TGWTGIS, Chapter Fifthteen_._

* * *

The real crux of the problem is that Tony doesn't want me to forgive him.

I'm the only person he ever trusted with his secret, but he doesn't want my acceptance and forgiveness. He doesn't want everyone to be okay with what's happened. The responsibility and pain of it all rests on his shoulders like a deadweight dragging him down to his death and he doesn't want to be saved. He wants to drown. He doesn't want me to pull him back from the edge. I forgave him because it's not in me to hold grudges. Some part of me has always been filled with more sympathy and love than is logical. I guess maybe I'm too forgiving for my own good, too trusting. One day that'll probably get me hurt.

Right now Tony is the one who's hurting. He's struggling under the weight of this load. How he ever managed to go through life after what happened, I'll never know. I think he just faked that he was okay for a long time and tried to push the pain away, but now it's all been brought back up onto the surface again. It's always been there, beneath his mask. He's been through so much, how could I ever hate him? He just wants everything to be okay and he's nearly killed himself working to make sure people are safe. He wants to save lives, redeem himself, keep people safe. Tony has a good heart. That heart's been broken, shattered and ripped out of him repeatedly, and yet deep down I know he's still good. If he was a monster he'd just get over it. Instead it haunts him constantly.

He ruined his own life because of alcohol, that repulsive demon in a bottle. Everything fell apart because of it. Tony, oh Tony. You're not a murderer, you're stupid when you're drunk. You aren't evil. I wish you'd realize that. The blame in my mind lies solely on that disgusting poison. I don't think for a second Tony would've been able to deliberately kill anyone. It was all a horrifying accident, but an _accident_ nonetheless. The same way alcohol is the real cause of death in a drunk driving accident what happened to Tony's mother wasn't his fault. The difference is that while drunk drivers knew what they were drinking was alcohol, Tony didn't and that's where it all went wrong.

I wish I could set him free from all this. I wish I could take that guilt and shame off of him. Right now all that pain is killing him. He will never be able to forgive himself because he loved them, he loved them both with all his heart. He was only a kid, he didn't know that doing that would kill her. He was drunk and mad. Ultimately he couldn't do it, even though the whole point of it was to kill Rococo once he got her in his arms he couldn't go through with it. He tried to save them even though the schnapps were making talking and thinking almost impossible. They found him with Rococo's cord cut and her wrapped in a towel in his arms – those aren't the actions of a murderer, just a confused kid who never meant to hurt anybody. Temper is deadly when alcohol enters the equation.

He didn't mean it. That's why I can forgive him, because I hear him cry himself to sleep and I know he never wanted things to turn out this way. What he did was haunting, terrifying, monstrous. But he was just a kid. I can't hate him, not when I see him in so much pain. I didn't know a heart could be that heavy. It's like there's no will to go on when he thinks about it. He wants to die for what he did, he wants to be hated, punished and hurt for this because he can't forgive him. He will never forgive himself for what he did under the influence. He won't even listen to reason and logic. Everything is his fault in his mind, no matter how much alcohol he had in his bloodstream at the time. He's trapped in a tangled mess of guilt and hate that none of us can set him free from because all of it is his. I don't hate him. His father forgave him. The problem is that he can't forgive himself.

I'm trapped. I love him like a brother. From the earliest days I can remember we were always together, always talking and playing and relying on each other. After what happened he snapped and went into a deep depression lasting months, but I wasn't there for him. I didn't realize what was going on. My mother told me that he was depressed because his mother died and I should give him space. Now I look back on what I did and I wish I could do it over because he obviously needed me to be there for him. He needed someone to confide in and I wasn't there to help him. Fast forward and it seems to be too late to repair the damage. I hope Tony can forgive me; if I had even had a clue how bad this was I would've talked him through all this madness and listened while he ranted. Instead he had to bottle it all up until finally it exploded.

He really isn't as tough as he looks. Physically he's fine, and he's a stubborn, strong willed guy. You'd have to get really close to him to know how broken he is. With his father dead, his inventions being turned into weapons and the guilt of his mother's death hanging over him it's a miracle he's even alive right now. When he tried to kill himself, it wasn't a cry for help, it was an attempt to rest. It's all too much for any one person to bear and the future doesn't look like it'll be any better to him. As close as I am I can envision it all too clearly in my mind's eye. Tony Stark is not made of iron. He's got limits on what he can handle just like everyone else does. The difference is that he will push himself beyond those limits on purpose. He wants to make up for what he's done. He wants to be punished. He wants it all to be over. God, Tony, how did it all get into this twisted mess?

Tony is a part of my family. He's part of my life. And yet even though I thought I knew him, I couldn't save him. There seems to be nothing I can do to help. That fact cuts like a knife. Tony is too important to me for me to sit here and do nothing. At the same time there's nothing I can do to make this right for him. He wants me to be mad, wants someone to hate him like he hates himself. He doesn't understand that he's family, and I can't hate family. There is nothing Tony Stark could ever do that would make him irredeemable to me, because you don't turn your back on family. Especially when that family member is clearly suffering so greatly. If anything, it draws me in even more.

I'm not surprised when I find him curled up around an empty bottle of vodka. I'm not even mad, not really. I just wish I could cure him of this. I wake him up for school and notice the tear stains on his cheeks. Tony Stark is a super hero, a genius, a smart aleck, an all around cool guy – to the rest of the world. To me he's just my best friend, and let's face it, crying is not the worst thing I've caught him doing. He catches sight of me, groans, swears and sinks back into the bed. I'm not mad. That's the problem with me, he tells me sometimes, is that I just look disappointed and say things that hit too close to home. I'm the only person I know that people wish would be more of an asshole.

"Tony, get up. We're going to school, and then you're going straight to your therapist. I think you should tell her about your mom."

Tony shouted something into his pillow that sounded suspiciously like 'fuck you'. Considering what we were talking about, the strong language was probably justified, and given my poor judgment earlier that exact phrase was pretty well earned. I winced at the sight of his chest, that eerie glow that always made me remember how close he came to death. But while he shot me one of those wonderful glares he specialized in, it didn't deter me from pressing on as he got dressed.

"I'm serious, Tony. For one, she's legally obligated to never tell a soul. Doctor-patient confidentiality means she can't unless she thinks you'll hurt someone else. So stay away from the temptation to say 'I am Iron Man' and you'll be fine," I added as he let out a snort of laughter. "But really, you need to talk to her about this. She's a professional youth therapist who regularly deals with the most messed up cases New York City can provide."

"Rhodey, I…" he winced visibly as he pulled on his shirt, "I… Well, you know what I did. She's supposed to get me through grief and get me off booze, I can't throw this at her."

"We live in New York City, Tony. She's seen things that make this look normal and wholesome. And it's her job to look at those things and go 'okay, let me help you'. You could at least give her a chance." A thought struck me. "What about my mom? You could-"

"No!" his eyes flashed with alarm. "She'll hate me and I've got nowhere else to go!"

"She wouldn't kick you out, Tony. My mom loves you. She's more protective of you than she is of me."

"That's because she doesn't what I did. If she found out she would _not_ want me around. And let's face it, that'd be a perfectly justifiable reaction to…" he trailed off, and when he continued, his voice was just above a whisper. "To murder. Any sane person would've just killed me off when I did it to keep me from turning into a criminal later on. It would've been kinder, too," he added under his breath, thinking I couldn't hear. "But the point remains that I am _not_ telling your mom about what happened to mine."

"You don't have to," said a voice from behind us, "I already knew."

I whirled around. "Mom?"

"Rhodey, breakfast is on the table. Go on ahead to school; I think it's time Tony and I talk."


	17. Sorry

Author's Note: MadroxMR qeustioned in a review why Tony doesn't seem to be under very strict supervision, which I'm sure is a very valid question to those who still have faith in hospitals. Allow me to explain myself: I'm basing his hospital/out-patient experience on what my sister, a certified nurse who works the mental health ward at a local hospital, tells me. From what she said most people are out in a week to three weeks and statistically speaking only ten percent of all attempted suicides are forced to have a therapist. For the sake of the story we'll assume Tony had a kindly doctor who made him get one anyway, but that's not the norm and there is no law in New York requiring he go to one. Hospitals in NYC in particular are constantly overcrowded and understaffed; they rush to get people out of the hospitals and treat them at home if at all possible because of how bad those two problems are.

This, my readers, is a case of Reality Is Unrealistic: you would _think_ there'd be stricter supervision and care for people who try to kill themselves, but you'd be wrong. (After talking to and having a family member who's a nurse, you quickly realize hospitals are not nearly as well run or organized as you thought they were.)

* * *

_It is easy to go down to hell; Night and Day the Gates of Dark Death stand wide; But to climb back up again, to retrace ones steps to the open air, there lies the problem, the difficult task._ – Virgil, _The Aeneid_, Book VI

_The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul._ – John Calvin

_I'm sorry, it's all that I can say. It means so much and I'd fix all that I've done if I could start again. I'd throw it all away to the shadows of regret and you would have the best of me. I know that I can't take back all of the mistakes, but I will try. Although it's not easy, I know you believe me 'cause I would not lie._ – Best of Me by Sum 41

* * *

"You know." Tony whispered, sounding strangled and suddenly out of breath. "You… you…"

"Rhodey, out. Now," Roberta Rhodes told her son firmly. "This is between me and Tony."

Tony inhaled sharply, eyes narrowing in alarm. He tried to read her face for traces of emotion, but she was simply looking firm and serious; he couldn't tell if she was furious with him or not. He felt electric bolts of panic go through him as he tried desperately to think. He had to come up with something, he had to try to figure out an excuse, an alibi, a lie, something to cover himself on this because if she knew the truth she would hate him. The realization his father had probably told her the truth years ago and it was too late to save him made his knees shake. He was trapped.

He felt so tired, he really did. Not physically, but mentally. He was just so out of energy, sick and tired of going over this again and again. Around and around in his head he went over what happened and he went through the guilt and shame over and over until it all became too much to bear. Now just when he'd been pushed to the very edge of what his sanity could take his foster mother was going to hate and berate him. And he couldn't even try to defend himself, because he deserved it, every word of it that was yet to come. He sank onto the bed, resting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. It was time to finally face this and he had nothing to say in his own defense, he didn't want to speak anymore of this terrible thing. There was simply nothing left to him.

Feeling strangely detached, as if this were all a dream, he felt rather than saw Rhodey's mom step forward to stand in front of him. He could not bring himself to meet her eyes. He couldn't think or even speak, because he'd given this far too much thought to keep going and there was nothing to be said. How could he excuse murder, willful and angry, against his own mother? He was deserving of whatever she was about to do or say. Likely she'd only taken him in because she and his father were close. There was no other explanation for letting such a monster into her house. Perhaps she was like Rhodey and refused to face the full horror of what he'd done, the absolute depravity of it all. It was very possible that more forgiveness and love speeches lay ahead. He hoped not. He was tired of trying to get across what he'd done. _I just wish this was all over… I wish I hadn't failed that night. I should've died when I tried to kill myself, everyone would be better off that way. I should've died in that plane crash._

"Anthony," Roberta interrupted him, speaking softly. "Please, don't clam up on me. Say something."

He crossed his arms, meeting her eyes dully. There was nothing to him, a sort of all encompassing hopelessness. "You wanted to talk. Talk."

"Tony, your father told me what happened a long time ago." When this got no reaction, she continued, "I don't hate you. I'm not throwing you out of the house, despite what you may think. I don't fear you, or even dislike you, though I _will_ want an explanation of where you had that vodka stashed," she nodded towards the bottle he'd drank his way through last night, which lay forgotten on the floor. "You're like one of my own. I love you, and-"

"Don't," the brunette said coldly. "Don't even try. I don't need any more of this 'I love you and all is forgiven' stuff. There's no way either of you mean it, not after what I did. I'm so sick of everyone being okay with this! Can someone just admit I'm not a good person? Please?"

His tone turned weak and pleading on that last word; she arched an eyebrow as she sat down beside him. She wrapped an arm around him with a sigh. "Your father was afraid this would happen, you know. He didn't want you to live like this, trapped under a metric ton of guilt. He loved you so much I don't have words to describe it – in spite of everything that happened your father never hated you. He cried, and he was sad, but he could never even contemplate hating you. He thought it was his fault for leaving liquor in the house where you could find it so easily, and I don't think the man ever touched schnapps again in his life."

"Dad blamed himself?" Tony asked in shock. "But… I was the one who…"

"Tony, your father blamed himself for a while. Then he turned to me one day and said that ultimately it was the alcohol. It wasn't you, you were too young and innocent to ever want to kill someone, and he knew it. He knew from the start that you had a good heart. Alcohol, though, can make murderers out literally anyone, and it doesn't matter how you got it, the point is that it was out of your hands." Roberta sighed, squeezing his shoulder gently, sympathetically. "He tried to get that across to you, he really did. I think he saw how depressed and angry alcohol made you once it all went down, and he never let any of it into the house again because he didn't want your life messed up anymore. He wanted you to rise above this. He saw the alcoholic in you a long time before any of the rest of us did.

He saw it and he knew that you were carrying all this pain inside. On the surface you were okay after a little while, but he knew better than to assume everything was over just because you could function. You've always been so different ever since it happened, so driven, so stubborn, so dedicated to inventing things and being good. It was like you were trying to earn back his love and approval, his forgiveness. But Tony, your dad gave you it a very long time ago. You don't have to push yourself to be perfect because of what you did. It's over, baby, it really is."

The teenager took several shaky breaths. There was so much emotion wrapped up in all this. Even the normally controlled Roberta Rhodes couldn't help but get teary eyed. He didn't like it, seeing her so emotional, because it was all wrong, everybody had it wrong, he didn't need to be forgiven and hugged he needed to be locked up and– Hot tears sprang up in his eyes against his wishes. He angrily swiped at them with enough force to hurt his eyelids as he struggled to keep it all together. He couldn't break down. He was Tony Stark and Tony Stark never cried into his foster mother's shoulder. He was an inventor, a super hero, a warrior. There were standards he had to hold himself to because… because… because…

Why _was_ he being so closed off anyway? Why couldn't he ever just have a heart to heart with someone without trying to change the subject or hold himself back? Ever since the murder he'd kept everyone at arm's length, even Rhodey. He'd always been scared of hurting them, he realized, scared of losing them once they knew the truth. That was why he had so many lies and secrets in his life, to protect those closest to him from himself. His worst fear was hurting any of them like he had his mother, in a fit of anger and hatred that he'd regret immediately afterward. He couldn't take any more loss. Yet even in his anger he had never done anything worse than kick some ass and yell at people. He hadn't killed anyone, had only thought about it a few times. Those times were brief, a few seconds long before he snapped out of it, unless he'd been drinking in which case it'd be several long hours of contemplation.

Those were key words, though, weren't they? Unless he'd been drinking, he didn't have it in him to go that far. Unless he'd been drinking he had morals and a conscience. Only when he was stressed, tired, angry and intoxicated did it cross his mind. Oh… Oh God, it really wasn't his fault. But it had to be, he'd done it of his own free will, and yet he wasn't sure if that even counted if he was drunk at the time. He had meant to kill Rococo before she was even born and someone died, so didn't that count as murder even if he hadn't killed the one he intended? He'd… he had – the blood, oh good lord all the blood had been atrocious, it was so real and vivid. Nothing they had in the movies could ever compare to that horrible smell and that red, that awful red. What had he done, what had he – this was unforgivable, but he never ever meant to – he had screamed and then Rococo had screamed back at him so small and frail and bloody…

"Tony?" Roberta's hands were tight on his shoulders as his body shook with the force of his sudden sobs. "Tony-"

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to, I never wanted, I tried to save them, I didn't, I couldn't, I'm sorry, I-"

Her arms wrapped around him tightly and he buried his face in her shoulder, feeling for all the world like he was eight years old again. If only he had a second chance at all this he'd do it all different. Dear lord, what had he done? He never meant to hurt anyone, he wasn't like that, it was that damn alcohol, but he hadn't learned. He'd just jumped right back into it once he got older, so he could feel better. But it wasn't worth it, not at the price of his loved ones. He had to quit, he really did. Not for himself, for his mother, Rhodey's mother, Rhodey, Pepper, Gene. If he stayed on this path nothing good would come of it even if it felt good at the time. It was such a wonderful release from everything and yet it was the cause of all those things he needed to escape from in the first place. He felt sick and dizzy and he wasn't sure if it was the hangover or if it was just hysteria. He inhaled slowly. All he smelled was blood like some kind of scented flashback.

"I'm sorry," he kept whispering like a prayer, "I'm so sorry."

There was blood in a small pool all around him. The little girl in his arms was in hysterics. His mother was unmoving, silently staring into space without so much as a twitch, but that didn't make sense, that wasn't right, she was still breathing so she wasn't dead. He had to call someone but what about the little girl, she was shaking and there was a cord attaching her to her - _their_ - mom and he didn't know what to do. Oh no, no no, he didn't mean it, he'd just been mad, he hadn't meant to hurt her and he didn't know if her meant their mom or the little girl anymore but he had to get help. Why was everything so blurry and fuzzy all over? He couldn't remember the number to dial at first, standing there numbly staring at the phone. His mother's blood was all over him, all over his sister, he had to call an ambulance. 911, he managed to remember, it was 911. 'My mom's dead, uh, kinda, there's a lot of blood, my sister's born early well not really born...' At some point he stopped rambling when the little girl screamed loudly. The newborn fit into the crook of one arm. He got the scissors and cut the cord thing so he could wrap her in his hoodie so she wouldn't be cold and she just kept screaming like he knew what he'd done- Tony pushed away from Rhodey's mother abruptly and ran to the bathroom, throwing up all the contents of his stomach and then some until only bile came out. The force of the action made his whole body break out in a sweat as he began to shake all over again. A chill settled over him.

He felt like he was dying, and his hangover had nothing to do with it.


	18. Gene, Interrupted

Author's Note: I know this is short. I just wanted a light hearted and happy moment to shine through the sea of angst. I guess I just like the idea of Pepper perking people up.

* * *

_I died so many years ago, but you can make me feel like it isn't so. And why you come to be with me, I think I finally know. _– Spike, in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode

_Delivered from my pain, you relieved me of my shame, and I am lost for what to say. I want you to stay, you make me sane. I want you to stay, you take the pain away._ – Take Me Away by Seether

* * *

He doesn't want her to love him like this.

He has no idea why it scares him that she's so enthralled with him. This isn't right. This is supposed to make him happy. So why is he petrified of her, why does her voice make him want to scream? She's so nice – what the hell does she want? Is she playing at something? What is she aiming for by getting so close to him? He already gave her all the ammo she'd ever need for blackmail, so does this mean all the niceness she's shown him is genuine? That scares him even more because he's not sure what that means either, only that he doesn't want her around. She does something to him with her enthusiasm and her constant energy, something he can't believe: she disarms him.

He talks, and they share coffee, and what is wrong with him? He's the freaking Mandarin; he shouldn't be sitting around having a study date with a schoolgirl when he's got so many other, bigger problems to attend to. He shouldn't be telling her about moving from China to America or how he wreaked Hell on his former classmates the day before he left. Why is he telling her this stupid story? Her laughter makes him smile and he doesn't understand why. Is this what normalcy is like, is this what having a real friend is supposed to be? It's been so long since he's ever been like this, no guard up and no lying to make himself look better. This is… this is how normal people are. It's freeing. Does everyone get to have someone who thinks they're hilarious and wonderful like this? No wonder Tony is so attached to her. It really has been a long time since he's had actual friends, long enough that he can't do a comparison, but if this is what it's supposed to be like he understands the attachment, the bond. He's just formed it and already he doesn't want to let her go.

No, truthfully that bond formed when she saw the scar, saw him. She saw him completely lost and confused when Stark tried to kill himself. He lectured doctors about the quality of their medical care and made ambiguous threats that had a dark undercurrent to them. He paced like a madman. He was lost in a sea of emotions that made no sense to him at all. Gene could not lose Stark, could not lose yet another person, he couldn't. He'd had to endure so much of that in his life that any more of it might push him over the edge. What lay beyond that edge, he wasn't sure. And hot anger boiled up within him purely because he was helpless in this moment, powerless to save him. _I can't lose another one,_ he'd thought desperately, his eyes tingling as if tears might start. _I just can't._

His defenses were down when he comforted Pepper. They stayed down even as he told her the truth about the scars she'd seen, the deep burn marks done with surgical precision. Why did he tell her that? Would it help him keep her? He didn't want to lose this strange bond they had, but it was such an intimate thing to reveal. Was he out of his mind? If she had wanted to she could have made his life Hell. And why not do so? It would only serve to her advantage socially if she ruined him; the voices against her would stop once she proved herself dangerous. He never should have even sat there alongside her. It was all one big mistake. So why did he do it? Why does she make him feel like opening up, like he can breathe again? What is this?

Then he saves her, ruining negotiations with people far more important than her to do so, and now he's beginning to question his sanity. Are friends supposed to be this stupid over each other? If so, he doesn't think friendship's nearly as beneficial as it's supposed to be. In fact, friendship seems to be making him act like a dumbass most of the time. He lets out a long, satisfying string of curses in Chinese that are half directed at himself, half at her. He lets his native tongue wash over him and take his anger away as he says things that would be censored from an R rated movie before punching a wall and returning to negotiations like it's all fine. Is this what friendship is about, a group of people he'd like to strangle and yet he never wants to lose? If so, then Pepper is easily his best friend ever. One police report and much squeeing later they find themselves walking alongside each other, and with his typical inner fury he should be pissed at her when she tackle-hugs him. Instead he's honestly fighting back a smile.

"Are we going to go back to our date now?" he asks, sounding annoyed. "And could you maybe let go of my neck before you snap it?"

"You're awesome," she gushes as if she hasn't heard him, "Like a Chinese ninja! Um, what's the Chinese equivalent to a ninja? Oh oh oh! Can you teach me Chinese?"

Gene stares at her as if she's from another planet. This is a possibility he has not yet ruled out. She really is something else. "Why would you want to learn such a hard language?"

"Because it's cool!"

He's getting confused. "When did Mandarin Chinese become cool in New York? I thought Japanese was the hipster-trendy thing."

"The second you got here," she answers him, happily looping her arms through his. "You're so awesome – oh, we should have Chinese names for each other! What's your name in Chinese?"

"Jianyu," he responds, if only to calm her down. "My mom always called me Jian, though."

Her squeal makes his whole body cringe. She thinks it's cute. His name is apparently adorable. If anyone else on the face of the Earth were to say that to him, even Stark, there would be a fist fight. He would be furious. But she's a girl. He couldn't hit a girl in annoyance like he would with Tony and Rhodey, he couldn't cuss her out because he wasn't some obnoxious American with no respect for women, and yet he finds strangely that he doesn't want to. It's actually tolerable coming from her. Is this more of that friendship stuff? Does being friends equal more patience and less anger? _If I'd had a normal childhood I'd know all this already. If Zhang hadn't ruined my life…_

Pepper interrupts his thoughts, unknowingly derailing his inner depression from even beginning. "What's it mean? Oh, does it have something to do with dragons? Is that why you wear dragon shirts all the time?"

"No, I just like them," he shoots back defensively. "Chinese dragons are way cooler than European ones. Ours control the weather with their mind, fly, use telepathy, and poop jade. Yours breathe fire. That's just sad. And my name means 'building the universe'."

"That's weird," she remarks absentmindedly. "Kinda pretentious. But at least it's not a spice. So what's a good Chinese name for me?"

"Hong mao guizi?" he suggests, and the fact that he can't get through that phrase with a straight face tips her off that she's just been insulted as he begins to chuckle uncontrollably.

"Jerk!" she says, despite not knowing what he's called her. "What did you just say?"

His laughter is beautiful to her. It's the first time she's heard it; his smile in involuntary and wide. He tries to hide his laughter behind his hands. Pepper finds it hard to believe any of his 'I'm sorry's are real when he's unable to keep walking because he's laughing so hard. He's got that horribly big grin Tony gets whenever he says something she can't repeat in public later. Honestly it's wonderful to see. To Gene, it's miraculous to feel. She's made him laugh more tonight than he has in the past eight years. And oh God, he had _nothing_ to laugh about, his life's a wreck so what the heck is wrong with him? It's like when she's around all this weight lifts off him. _Maybe _this _is what makes people so gung-ho about friendship._ The expression of irritation on her face makes him laugh anew.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, that was a terrible joke and I'm going to Hell now," he says as he regains control of himself. Pepper rolls her eyes and throws her hands up, exasperated, as he cracks up again, chuckling heartily.

"Boys are so immature. I bet you just made some comment about boobs or something."

"Worse," he admits, grinning mischievously. "Hong mao guizi is to white people in China what nigger is to black people in America."

She gasps. "Gene! That's awful!"

His grin is contagious. "I know, isn't it?"

And somehow all his problems, fears and anxiety completely melt away when she joins him in laughing at that horrible joke; he can't be downtrodden when he sees her smile.


	19. Madness And Masks

Author's Note: Whitney... Her suicide attempt means that she never got treated for the mask's poisoning, which means it's still screwing with her head as we speak, and really, did you think after all my melodramatic realism that he'd just be able to say sorry and make it all better? That's not how life works. And let's face it, we've already thrown canon out the window, dropped a piano on it and shot its corpse with a bazooka. Like we could any more off my original idea at this point. -rolls eyes at self-

This chapter is meant to be confusing; the mask's neuropoisoning is messing with Whitney's ability to recall events in the sequence that they happened. Whitney's final line is a shout out to a very fine work of fiction, as is the messed up sequences of events. Anyone who can guess what I'm referencing wins a prize. No, seriously, you do; there is an actual prize involved. Fanfic, any length you want, any plot you want, any pairing you choose.

* * *

_Sparkling angel, I believed you were my savior in my time of need. Blinded by faith, I couldn't hear all the whispers, the warnings so clear. I see the angels, I'll lead them to your door. There's no escape now, no mercy no more. No remorse, because I still remember._ – Angels by Within Temptation

_The stranger in the mirror, I don't know her, I fear her, I cry for her everyday when I see her in me. Shards of broken glass in my fingers, crying raindrops and falling I suffer not knowing the way to hate her, and I do._ – Svebrenka Pazik, Serbian singer and songwriter

* * *

It's too late, it's far too late.

Inhale, exhale. "Madame Mask, come out now! We have you surrounded."

Not well enough, never well enough. Not right, not good, not strong – they're weak, they've only got natural strength, they can't possibly take her and that's a damn shame. Their shouts and voices fade into so much background noise as she extends her arm in a motion so familiar she could do it in her sleep. Switch and aim randomly at a different officer at the last possible second, throw out the smokescreen and run. Through the shadows vanish and don't look back, inhale exhale right foot left foot with all your strength, let it all fall away.

Use the civilian identify she got on the way in, the nameless nondescript average person, inhale and exhale like she hasn't just run and shot her way through a building. She is on the street before they realize they've even lost her.

It's too late to save him.

"Is something wrong, Whitney?" Happy asks her, noting the way sweat is trickling down her face. "Are you sick or something? Huh?"

"Yeah," she says weakly, "I – I gotta…" and she runs for the bathroom because suddenly he has her father's face and she's scared, she's so scared.

The water feels good as she leans over the sink, she looks in the mirror and sees how pale she is, sickly and twisted and why is she like this? The doctors said she was fine, they ran every possible test, there's no reason for her to be anything but healthy they said she was okay – wait, when did she get back to school? She doesn't remember leaving the hospital bed, she was so tired and weak after what happened they said there'd be at least a couple more weeks in bed. She shuts her eyes tightly, gripping the sink as hard as she can. It turns into scratchy hospital sheets in her hands and her father is suddenly standing above her looking worried. What? A few seconds ago they were at school and he hated her, what's going on?

"You need some rest, I'll be back in the morning," her father tells her, and he turns to leave. She reaches for him and he doesn't feel her touch because she's not at the hospital, she's in her bed, her own bed at home. Frightened and coated in sweat, she sinks back into the sheets and waits for things to change again. When they don't she slowly, cautiously gets out of bed and walks over to her closet, if only to touch the door and confirm it is real. She was not right, she was sick, swimming in confusion as the room threatened to spin, and she's scared. She remembers her dad saying he loved her, she remembers Tony offering her a muffin, glad that she was back in school, but everything seems so surreal, so fake.

He doesn't love her, he's just lying.

He used to, once, but he doesn't now. He's never loved her, he just uses her. That was why he let her get close to her, why he held her and hung out with her. He's been stringing her along from day one and she's been buying into it, she always has. She's overheated; sweat is currently coating every inch of her body. What on Earth? Her blood pressure is low, she can't be too hot when she should logically be cold. What drug did he have put in her? A tracer? A tranquilizer? What has he done now?

There's all these voices, all this panic, and yet she's never thought so clearly in her life. Of course, of course it was all a lie. He spent all that time getting close to her, telling her all his dreams and troubles just so he could use her. He knew what she felt, knew she loved him so he decided to make the best of it. Send her after Tony Stark, string her along, but he'd slipped, oh thank God he'd slipped and she saw him for what he was. He was always so cold and cruel that it had to be an act, the nice part of him she'd seen, the good and kind part that only existed in private. Of course it did, he only needed to act around her.

She's dizzy and hot, but she wipes off the sweat and looks through her room. She will not take any of the laser or energy guns. She isn't a monster like he is, she isn't cold hearted and cruel, she won't torture him, no not ever that – gun, she needs something that takes normal metal bullets so it'll be fast and lethal. Just an instant and he'll be gone and it'll all he okay, it has to be, all her problems come from him and the pain he's caused her. With him gone it'll all be better. The sweat drips down her legs as she changes clothing quickly and efficiently. This heat is scientifically impossible, because she has chronic low blood pressure that should be making her cold. What's the one uncontrolled factor in her life? Him. Therefore he did this.

He must have realized she was onto him! His acting had been pretty good in the hospital, but not good enough and he must've realized his long absence had tipped her off to his phoniness. So he was trying to get rid of her on his own time, the idiot. He had no idea who he was dealing with. He'd always been so vicious to her, so cruel and cold and unloving, but she wasn't that weak little girl anymore, not his little girl. On some level she was aware her thoughts were racing to an alarming speed and she ignored any form of alarm over that fact because she knew it was whatever drug was heating her up like this. He must be trying to poison her somehow, get her body to overheat so she would die of heatstroke all alone in this big house. Ingenious. Monstrous, but ingenious.

She has to save herself, has to stay alive.

Whitney is huddled in a bathroom stall, she's sobbing so hard she can't breathe, and Happy Hogan is there asking her what's wrong. She's sick, she hears herself tell him. Nurse, she needs a nurse, a teacher, she can trust them. He's confused but he does it, finding a teacher in the hall to come to her rescue, she's so achy and fiery all over she collapses outright.

She's walking down the hall of her father's company looking like his chief of security and there's a loaded gun on her. This ends now, she doesn't want to die, she just wants to live. Everything's so confusing, but once he's gone and his drugs are out of her system she'll be okay. Tony, Tony's in danger, even if they take her to jail and let this drug kill her that's okay because Tony might die if she doesn't save him. He's always been nice to her no matter how much everyone else hated her, she has to help him, has to rescue him, he deserves it. She knocks on the door. Her father tells her to come in.

"Tony!" he whirls around when he hears her. Pepper says something, some kind of objection about interrupting people's conversations. The blonde grabs her by the shoulders. "You! You're with Tony all the time, you boss him around constantly!" she says as if having an epiphany.

"Hey!" Pepper objects, looking offended, "Rhodey's worse!"

"We live together," Rhodey says in self-defense. "We can't help it."

"Both of you,_ shut up_," Whitney hisses. Sweat is forming anew on her as she levels a glare at the three of them that creates dead silence in its wake. "This is about my father. Tony, stay away from Stark International tonight, go somewhere safe, hide. Pepper, Rhodey, make him." She gives the black boy and redhead pleading looks. "Please, I don't want Tony to die."

"Die, what do you…?" but she's gone, walking away with her arms around herself as she begins to shake uncontrollably. The bell rings for the next class, the one where she and Happy always sit next to each other in the back, and she thinks that's important for some reason.

She's home and it's night time, she's incredibly happy for some odd reason and she celebrates by taking an ice cold shower that makes her heart stop hammering in her chest. When she opens the bathroom door there's a police officer standing there looking sad, and her confusion is genuine when she asks what's wrong, what happened. Then he tells her there's been an accident, an assassination, and she recoils in horror, knees buckling under her in an instant as the heat rushes back with a painful vengeance. The world explodes in heat so that she cannot stay conscious any longer, and when she wakes up in a hospital bed she doesn't know what time she's in and what's real anymore.

"What is it?" her father asks her, and her form shift from his secruity chief into Madame Mask. She pulls the gun out in that beautiful gesture that feels as natural as breathing and aims between the eyes. His hands go into the air in standard negotiation procedure as his eyes narrow dangerously. "You. You're Madame Mask. What do you want?"

"To live," she says softly, and pulls the trigger before he can dodge.


	20. Prentious Title Goes Here!

Author's Note: More angst, more pain, and more confusion. In other words, standard Fluffle crap. I think this is officially my jumping the shark moment and I **really** need a better summary for this thing, but I'm out of ideas on how to explain this fanfic since the plot boils down to 'everything gets worse and everyone has a dark past/secret and then things get worse'. And I do mean everyone. But we'll get to that later. For now, here's some plot advancement and angst.

* * *

_Friendship should not be a plot point, it should be a tangible love between all parties involved that is deep, enduring, and at the same time light hearted and ever-present._ – Serbian novelist Tjom Passich's essay 12 Rules of Writing

_No man is rich enough to buy back his own past. – _Oscar Wilde

* * *

Tony liked having Pepper around; she was good to bounce ideas off of.

He liked hearing her talk, theorize, ramble. Her theories ranged from plausible to impossible, but the fact remained that Whitney was currently in a coma and Stane was dead. These two things had massive ramifications across the board. For one thing, it meant that Stane's vice president was in charge. He pulled up the man's file and did a quick look over. Not a criminal, not evil, not insane, but there was no indicator that he wouldn't keep going in the direction Stane had been. The new head of Stark International was a man named Sasha Nein, a German with bowl-cut black hair and a past in the FBI before working for SHIELD for a while. Eventually after ten years of service to them, he'd been injured and so had retired to a more normal job, He seemed on the surface like a decent enough person. In the wake of his sudden promotion by death he was trying to upgrade security to prevent such a thing happening again. That he and Stane had never been on good terms would've made him a suspect had there not been video footage showing it was a random attack.

Nein was not a problem right now; he'd have his hands full trying to Madame Mask-proof the building. Tony didn't envy him, having to try to keep everyone in the building from flying into a mad panic. Press conferences had to be held, statements had to be made and the police were still investigating. Tony had a program go through video files of Nein to try to read his intentions from his face's micro-twitches. The man was genuinely surprised and stressed, which meant he hadn't called in a hit on Stane. It was a small thing, but it ruled out the possibility of foul play. Right now that was all they could do, rule out possibilities and theories one at a time to try and come up with a reason for this. They had no clue why Whitney had done this, and they weren't able to hack into Stark International to get the video footage of what had happened either. There were no clues, nothing to build on. They were lost.

Honestly, Tony had never been so grateful for Pepper. If anyone was ready to come up with theories, it was her. She had a series of notebooks spread out around her as they bounced ideas off each other rapidly. Everything involving the new head of Stark International was out; human beings were incapable of controlling their facial twitches, which were only detectable by an advanced computer program. Once that thing had declared him innocent Tony believed it completely. Then there was the fact that they, unlike the rest of the world, knew just how dark and cold Stane could be, which crossed out all theories of him being innocent. So there were only a few options left, and all of them centered on the late Obadiah Stane and why Whitney had been acting so weird the past couple of days.

She had warned him, with great terror and fear for his safety. She had begged Pepper and Rhodey not to let him get hurt and they had kept their promise simply because she had been shaking at the time. Whitney Stane never acted like that, so weak and scared. She had known something horrible was coming, something lethal. But what? Pepper's theory was that Stane was going to kill him and Whitney had decided to take him out before that happened.

"It makes sense," the redhead said to him contemplatively. "Stane probably did something to her, why else would she have looked so awful? She was so sick her make up couldn't hide it, and we can't blame that on her suicide attempt because she was fine for a whole week after that. There's no reason for her to suddenly get sick unless Stane's behind it."

"Why would he try to kill his own daughter?" Rhodey put in from his spot at his computer chair, where he was still digging up information on Stane's replacement. "What did she know that required lethal silencing?"

"It had to do with me, we know that," Tony mused, scanning over a few news articles on what had happened. "Stane was going to hurt me, maybe kill me, probably because I'm one of the only people alive that still thinks he was behind my dad's death. Without me around there'd be one less accusation to worry about. Pepper, write that down."

"This list is getting long again," she muttered, sounding dissatisfied. "So his response to Whitney finding out about his plan was to poison her? What the hell? Does he have a heart?"

"Past tense, he's dead now," Tony corrected her for the twelfth time that hour. "And Obadiah Stane never had a heart. He could be nice to people, but he always seemed to swing between heartless hateful jerk and perfectly polite businessman. There was a time he was really nice to Whitney and a great guy – right before he asked her to spy on me. It's safe to assume that no, he didn't have a heart. Maybe he faked it sometimes to help fool people, but this guy killed my dad and turned Stark International into a death factory for the sake of money. Once Whitney outlived her usefulness…"

"That doesn't make sense, Tony," Rhodey cut in. "After she tried to kill herself, he spent tons of money and time making sure she was okay. Remember the private room with guards around it and security throwing us from the building for daring to ask if we could see her? That's not something he'd do if he was a heartless bastard. If he wanted her out of the way he'd have killed her then."

Tony groaned. "Pepper, he's right. Cross out the theories where Obadiah tried to kill Whitney."

"And now our list is short," she sighed. "But I'm not crossing off the theory about him trying to kill you. That makes sense, and it makes sense that she'd know about it. I can even understand her killing him to stop him from killing other people. I mean, if he was going to hurt someone she cared about she probably felt like she didn't have a choice. The thing that doesn't make sense is why she's sick now."

"Why is it a foregone conclusion that her killing him is justified?" Rhodey asked, quirking an eyebrow at her. "And why are you so okay with that?"

"This is Stane we're talking about, he's a murderer who owns what's quickly turning into a high tech weapons company," Pepper replied, scribbling something down idly. "Who knows what that jerk was doing to her behind closed doors! He could've been abusive or obsessive, I mean look at how he reacted after she almost died, that wasn't natural. All those doctors and specialists after years of acting like she doesn't exist? Obadiah was a complete psycho. It's not like Whitney just killed him because she wanted to, Rhodey. People don't do that unless they're psychos or something."

Tony's whole body tensed; his clenched his fists tightly for a moment. His storm-blue eyes met Rhodey's ice brown and there was nothing short of terror in them, a silent fear. They looked away from each other before Pepper could notice, but Tony had to focus hard to keep himself from panicking. If Pepper knew what he had done she would hate him, she would never speak to him again, she… He inhaled slowly, trying to pull his thoughts back together. Pepper would never know, because he would never tell her what had happened and there was no way she'd ever know. There were only three people alive who knew the truth, himself and two people he knew would never betray him. His fists unclenched; there were marks in his palms from where his nails had dug into the skin.

"I'm gonna go get us some snacks," Rhodey said, breaking the busy silence. Once he left, the room went quiet. "It's getting close to lunch, you know."

Tony had a strange darkness that overtook him sometimes, a beautifully cold detachment where killing seemed like a valid option. That utter lack of everything washed over him without alcohol involved at all, and it scared him when he came out of it and realized that in those moments the lives of all those around him meant absolutely nothing. Ever since what happened with his mother he'd had that capacity, that horrifying utter lack of everything where he could do it if he wanted to, if he'd had reason to. There were dreams about it, where he was in that state and no one was around to stop him or tell him it was wrong. He couldn't understand what was triggering it, and when it came he stayed wherever he was, steadfastly avoiding alcohol and trying to will the insanity away.

Psycho. Was that what she'd think if she knew? Was that what Pepper would call him? It was true, wasn't it? He'd been getting better lately, he'd been desperately trying to work through all this, but no one had any idea that there was this thing lurking inside Tony Stark. No one could ever know about it, because talking about it would mean talking about his mother's death, that horrifying moment where it all went wrong. Something was altered deep within him that day. He wasn't crazy though, was he? He tried so hard to keep the insanity inside, to keep it from ever rising to the surface. Even when he felt the urge to see blood Tony managed to act normal until it subsided. He wasn't evil.

But he could be. He shuddered and turned his eyes back onto the computer screen in front of him. Whitney was now a murderer. She was his friend, someone everyone thought was pretty, a good dancer, average. She was a daughter, a lonely kid, and a terrified girl who had lived under the iron grip of a madman for years and so her actions were excusable to Pepper. His were pitiable, because he knew it was truly the alcohol's fault, but the world would never buy that explanation. This was how it would have been viewed if his father had let what happened go public. This could have been him. The press was having a field day with this calling her everything from a secret serial killer to a complete psychopath. Tony felt his blood boil. _It wasn't like that! She had to save my life and even if she didn't he was a murderer to begin with. She had every right to shoot him through the head; he would've done the same to her._ Then, almost like a whisper in his own mind, he thought, _I wonder what that looks like?_

It all rushed back in, that coldness that was so familiar. Visions of violence flashed before him and he had to work hard to keep his thoughts from staying there. He didn't want to go into this mode, this apathy, not now. Not when Pepper was so close; the idea set him on edge. If he acted weird and she sensed it he was afraid she'd start to see through him. What she'd find under the various layers of airs and traits was a deeply disturbed person, someone she could never like let alone love. _Psycho._ Leave it to Pepper to stab him through the heart on accident, to hit his weak spot and be oblivious to the critical hit she'd just made.

Think, think, distract himself. There were problems at hand, things he needed to get done. He had to focus. He had to pretend that Pepper's approval didn't mean so much to him, because now was neither the time nor the place to sit around moping over such things. Besides, ultimately she was right, killing someone without a reason wasn't right, it was something only an insane person would do. But Whitney wasn't insane, never had been. She had been head over heels with devotion and love for a manipulative man who never seemed to care, but that wasn't insane, that was just sort of sad. So it must've taken something extreme to make her decide this was the right course of action to take. Something must've gone really wrong.

"Pepper," he said, thinking out loud. "Do you hate Whitney?"

"Um… Well…" she shifted uncomfortably. "I've never really liked her, I don't know why. She just rubs me the wrong way, you know? But I don't hate her. She saved your life and she did it by putting a bullet through her own dad's head. She must love you a lot to choose you over him, and that means she's a good person even if something about her makes me wanna scream. I know this should freak me out but then I think about how desperately she wanted you to be safe. She was shaking. She was really scared. Now I just kind of feel sorry for her, even if I don't know what happened, because she just looked so broken and terrified."

His storm blue eyes fixed on her intently. "So you're okay with what she did because you know the backstory?"

"Of course, Tony. I'm not her sworn enemy or anything, I mean, if there's a reason behind it – and we both know there is, even if we don't know _what_ it is – then I have to at least _try_ to understand this whole mess." She gave him a strange look. "Why did you ask? Did you really think I'd be all anti-Whitney at a time like this?"

He paused and that pause earned him a glare that could've frozen fire. He winced, avoiding her eyes. Hers narrowed slightly, the light brown glinting in the low light. Tony tried to look like he was scanning the computer screen and everything was normal, but she wasn't dumb. People thought Pepper was, because she was hyper. The truth was that she was emotionally aware of those around her at all times just like Rhodey was. Just because she didn't call Tony out of his behavior like Rhodey did didn't mean she wasn't situationally aware. She and Rhodey were the same in that one way Tony was not: they were able to read emotions without getting confused. They saw happy, sad, never a series of disjointed heat based signals like he did. If anything Pepper was worse than Rhodey because it was hard to put up a guard around someone as friendly and open as she was.

She knew that she'd been asked a loaded question, that Tony was trying to figure something out in his head. "What's wrong, Tony? What are you thinking about?"

"Murder," he replied honestly, glancing at her before looking away hastily. He carefully kept his eyes trained on the computer screen while he spoke. "Pepper, let me ask you something – where do you draw the line? What kind of murder is okay to you and what isn't? What's unforgivable to you?"

The seriousness of his tone made her stand and draw close to him. He really wished she wouldn't do that; she was so pristine and earnest looking. It sickened him. He didn't deserve these kinds of friends. She was understanding, concerned, and if she knew she wouldn't be. If she knew she would never, ever want to come this close to him again. Tony tried to envision those dusty slate colored eyes filled with rage and hurt, betrayal and hate. It was impossible to imagine simply because while he'd seen her angry, Pepper never truly hated anyone. That didn't mean she wouldn't hate him for this, it just meant he'd be the first person to hurt her that badly. Her eyes drew him in like magnets.

"This isn't about Whitney, is it?"

He shut his eyes to block her out. "Pepper-" He stopped abruptly.

No, he couldn't. He absolutely couldn't tell her. She was too clever, so even if he hinted it to her she'd figure it out. Oh God, how he wanted for her to tell him it was okay and mean it. How he wanted her to know him, all of him, the darkness and the hurt. He wanted to tell her all the things he'd told Rhodey and he didn't know why. What he did know were the reasons why not to tell her. He would lose her if he did, he would lose one of his few real friends forever. Tony couldn't take that right now. He had enough drama, enough stress and insanity to deal with as it was without having to deal with this, too. The burden was too much to bear and yet the secret would destroy him if released; he was trapped inside his own past.

She placed a hand on his shoulder, gently. Her expression was soft, sympathetic. "You did something terrible, didn't you?" His whole body tensed and he opened his mouth to object. "Let me finish. Tony, you did something… bad. I can tell just by how you're acting. But, um, this is hard to explain, but… we don't need to talk about it, okay? Not until you want to. Just let me say this: it's okay. Whatever it is, it's okay. I forgive you."

"You don't even know what I did," he whispered, pushing his chair back and standing so he could be eye to eye with her. "You have no idea… Pepper, I…" He couldn't go on.

"It doesn't matter what happened," she assured him stubbornly. "I know you, Tony. And I know there's a reason for what you did."

"Being drunk isn't a good reason to be a monster," he replied, sounding disturbingly distant and downtrodden. "There isn't any good excuse for this, Pepper. I'm not a good person, I'm just a violent fucking _drunk_-"

Pepper slapped him in a flash so fast he didn't even see it. The action stunned his out of his blank, expressionless state. She glowered at him. "Don't you ever talk about yourself like that, Tony. You're not a bad person just because you have a problem, and you're not a monster because you made a mistake. Now shut up and listen: bad people don't become Iron Man and fly around saving lives and kicking ass. Violent people don't put on a trillion dollar battle suit then pointedly not kill anybody. Monsters don't regret what they did. You aren't _evil_, you're a hero."

He blinked at her, still dazed from the slap. His whole train of thought about how he was a crappy person and needed a beer had been completely derailed. Tony took a second to mull over her words. He bit his lip, considering the pros and cons of letting the truth come to light. She was so close he could see the specks of dark brown in her beige-dust colored eyes; it was like her irises had freckles of their own. She was completely convinced he was a good man, completely devoted to him. That scared him. There was still that horrible coldness that lurked in the edges of his consciousness, that apathetic insanity he could so easily slip into. It wasn't safe to be near her, let alone let her know how messed up he really was. He would lose her.

"Pepper, you never answered my question," he said quietly, voice just above a whisper. "What's unforgivable to you?"

"Nothing, when you're involved," she replied without hesitation, and before he could pull away she leaned forward to kiss him gently on the cheek. Her arms looped around his shoulders as, without any hint of shyness, she leaned her head against his and looked directly into his eyes. "I may get mad at you sometimes and we may fight, but Tony? I could never hate you. Whatever you did, you're forgiven, okay?" she buried her head into his shoulder and hugged him tightly. "We're friends. This is how it _works_. I'm sure Rhodey would tell you the same thing, 'cept without the hug since he's not secure in his masculinity."

"Thanks for that, Pepper," Rhodey snapped as he threw a can of her favorite cream soda at her, which she caught in mid air. He handed Tony his Mountain Dew without taking his eyes off Pepper. "Do you two always talk smack about me when my back is turned, or do you just make out and cuddle?"

"Both," Tony replied with a smirk, while at the same time Pepper indignantly yelled, as her cheeks turned red, "Neither!" They turned on each other in an instant. "Shut up!" they chorused at each other, and then they both seemed to realize at the same time that they were holding something carbonated and Rhodey was holding chips. The resulting food fight nearly killed every computer in the room. They ended up sprawled across the floor, clothes ruined and laughter resounding.

_Yeah,_ Tony thought to himself, _I like having Pepper around. That chick can _not_ dodge worth crap._


	21. The N Word

Author's Note: This is what I like to call a breather chapter, and by that I mean it's a light hearted chapter with some foreshadowing and off color jokes. Basically I pumped this out because it's Christmas (er, well, it is for Serbian Orthodox Catholics like my parents; the rest of you have it on Friday). I just can't write depressing things this close to the holidays, I'm incapable of it. Granted, this chapter's got some foreshadowing, but it's not dark. I just… I just can't be dark on Christmas, okay? I don't care if it's not your winter holiday, it's mine, and I can't be the depressing inner-demon-fighting angst writer I normally am today.

Oh, and if you find this chapter offensive, please remember that these are teenagers living in a diverse multi-cultural city. Realistically these kinds of jokes do indeed come up, and let's be frank: the first thing you'd do if you got a chance to learn a foreign language that virtually no one around you spoke would be to look up the bad words.

Also, forgive the lack of pinyin accents marks on everybody's Chinese. FF dot net wouldn't load them correctly and it's not critical to the plot, so after twenty minutes of trying to get this thing to load them I just gave up. And yes, I'm fully aware that Gene Khan would probably not be affectionate enough to give Pepper a Chinese pet-name in canon, but I liked the idea too much not to use it.

* * *

_A joke's a very serious thing._ – Charles Churchill

_Do yourself a favor: do not attempt to make every word in every chapter dead serious. Life is not all serious, even though things certainly get dark and disturbing quite often. But if you recall your own dark days you will note what in retrospect seems a quite jarring collection of happy, light hearted moments between yourselves and your friends. _That_ is realism, not all of this grimdark nonsense modern writers keep spewing out._ – Writer and poet Mi Tak Sun

* * *

It was amazing to Tony how, even in the midst of things going wrong all around him, hanging out could smooth all of that over.

Having decided to cease their tiring, dead-end investigation into what happened to Obadiah and Whitney after a full day of uselessness, the three had decided to call Gene over and relax. It was time for pizza, video games and general unwinding before Tony would inevitably go back to his one-man investigation. Of course, being that he had more than a few workaholic tendencies, he'd been up all night hacking into every establishment within a mile of Stark International that had a security camera. No clues were there that he could find, although he did have the good sense to ask Pepper to run a background check on the new head of Stark International. The results were very interesting, but nothing worrying. Which meant that after a full twenty four hours of soda fights, hacking and theorizing, 'Team Iron Man' (as Pepper dubbed them) had no idea what was going on.

This was their break, their day off so that they could relax and unwind briefly before they'd have to go back to facing reality. And Tony fully intended to give this matter his whole attention once they had a long break. A long break that involved pizza with olives and extra cheese, and that elixir of the nerds, Mountain Dew. Tony would've gone for an energy drink, but Rhodey's mom had cut him off of those ever since that one time he was up for three days straight. In a fit of hyper-activity he had decided to make every electronic device in the house sing. It took a week before he was able to undo everything, and since then only nice normal drinks without the metric ton of sugar and caffeine were allowed in the Rhodes household. Tony and his mini-circle of friends lay around the living room sipping their various drinks of choices and debating what game to play when the doorbell rang.

"Jianyu-rén!" Pepper chirped cheerfully, hugging him happily in her typical fangirly manner. "Nihao ma?"

"Wo henhao. Ni ne?" he replied, apparently not phased in the least by her hug.

"Wo leile," she grumbled, and the dirty look she shot Tony made him have the distinct feeling they were talking about him behind his back. "A certain _someone_ just had to call me at three in the morning."

Tony was about to object that he had been working and hadn't realized the time when something occurred to him. "When the heck did Gene teach you Chinese?"

"I'm still learning," she said happily, and let out a delighted squeal. "But SHIELD always gives top preference to bilingual applicants! I am SO gonna kick ass when I apply! And if I can get into French next year I'll be even closer to getting my dream job-"

"If you think you're going to learn Chinese by next school year, you're crazy," Gene informed her flatly. "If it took you half the time it took me to learn English, you'd still never make it, Peméi."

_Pem__éi?_ Tony thought, raising an eyebrow and mouthing the word to Rhodey, who shrugged slightly. "Gene, you do realize Pepper's just going to take two languages at once, right?"

"Stark, people who do that never get anywhere in their education. They just get the two mixed up," the Chinese boy countered logically. "It's a proven fact that your brain can't learn two languages at once and keep them separated; not as an adult, anyway. Only little kids and toddlers can." He paused, smirking suddenly at Pepper. "Oh, wait, you're right. Given her maturity level she should be able to take ten languages and be fine."

Pepper pouted and said something that, Chinese or not, could easily be identified as profanity just by her tone of voice. Tony smirked at Gene retorted with something that made Pepper shriek 'don't call me that you racist jerk!' and began to chase him. The brunette grinned at Rhodey. _And he thought Pepper and Gene would never get along._ Their circle of friends wasn't big, but all the tension that had first been there between everyone was gone now. Tony felt as if some kind of weight had been lifted from him, if only for a moment, as he watched Pepper tackle Gene and snatch off his sunglasses. She put them on, stepped onto the living room table and did a disturbingly convincing Gene-stare; Rhodey snorted as Gene protested loudly and Tony cheered her on.

"Hi, I'm Jianyu," Pepper said in Gene's typical cool, low voice. "I call myself Gene because I'm a racist douche who doesn't think white people are smart enough to pronounce my Chinese name. I call white people niggers in Chinese because it helps compensate for my small-"

"Peméi!" Gene shouted loudly, though he could scarcely be heard over Tony and Rhodey's barely-contained laughter, "It's not the same thing when we're friends! Think about it, people talk bad about their friends all the time – and it's cool because we hang out. So can I have my glasses back, please?"

"You don't call Rhodey or Tony hong mao guizi and they're your friends," she pointed out, peering over his glasses at him. In a dead-on impression of him, she chuckled and added, "This is awkward."

As Tony high-fived her, the now red-faced Chinese boy attempted to defend himself. "Hong mao guizi is a slur for redheads and you're the only redhead I know! Besides, I can call you and Tony names and be fine, but if a teacher ever hears me call Rhodey something I am _screwed_." Gene took his glasses off Pepper, who grinned innocently. "One thing I learned really early on in America is that you can call white people anything you want and they don't get offended, but say one Chinese word while _looking_ at a black person and you're in deep."

Tony's curiosity was peaked. Gene didn't talk much about coming to the States from China, other than to occasionally critique ignorant high school kids who didn't know anything about China. Sometimes Gene even felt the need to tell the History teacher just how badly he was mangling Gene's native tongue, and of course there were many times where Gene cursed in Chinese and then deliberately refused to translate it. For the most part, though, that particular part of his past was something that didn't come up in conversation. It wasn't a sore spot, it was just kind of not relevant to conversation or life beyond 'you can read Chinese? Sweet, let's run off to an iceberg together!'. (The fact that this train of logic made sense in Tony's life made him realize he was failing rather hard at the whole 'normality' thing.)

"What, did you get in trouble for saying hi or something?" Tony asked with not just a touch of sarcasm. Gene nodded, smiling faintly. The brunette raised an eyebrow. "Really?"

"Detention. Two weeks. For _saying hi_ in Chinese. Black people are apparently very sensitive." He paused, then added, "No offense, Rhodey. It's just that I can trust Pepper not to sue me if I call her hong mao guizi. She'll be furious and she'll steal my glasses, but she won't immediately run for the nearest teacher, and neither will Tony. Both of them make jokes about race and different groups and you… you don't. You're kind of uptight like that."

"You know, Gene's right," Pepper remarked, as if this were a new idea to her. "Now that I think about it, you never laugh at that kind of stuff. Even the non-race jokes, like when Tony tells me to turn down my hair before the sidewalk starts melting."

"And when your brother visits you always act like you've been hit when he says 'nigger'-" Tony promptly shut his mouth. Rhodey's brother was a touchy subject and bringing him up at any given point was a surefire way to incite Rhodey's wrath. The last time he'd asked about that particular mess Rhodey hadn't spoken to him for the rest of the day. "-But I always thought that was because it mispronounced it," Tony finished weakly, with a grin. Rhodey's glare did not lighten in the slightest. (To be fair, it was true; he tended to say the n-word as if it ended in an a rather than er. Tony wasn't sure how Rhodey said it because he'd never heard his friend say it at all.)

"Guys," Rhodey said coldly, getting all their attention instantly with the intensity in his voice, "Do you have _any_ idea how seriously my mom takes this kind of thing? She may look sweet and nice, but she can and will turn on you in a heartbeat. And guys? She is _scary_ when she's mad. She makes grown men shake when she gets angry."

"We're not your mom," Tony shot back with a still nervous grin. "If anything you're my mom, and besides, do you really think we'd tell on you if you laughed at a joke?"

Rhodey seemed to pause to consider this. "Well, no-"

"And you know we're all joking when we make fun of each other and we're not racist, right?" Pepper asked, quirking an eyebrow at him.

"Well, yes-"

"You do get that it's funny precisely _because_ it's offensive, right?" Gene added in with a devilish grin. "It's only funny because it's so awful. Replace hong mao guizi with redhead and it's just not funny. You get that, right?"

Rhodey was beginning to look significantly relaxed. He smiled faintly, waving his hand dismissively at Gene. "Yeah, yeah, I get it. Nigga hush."

The sheer fact that it was prim and proper Rhodey saying it reduced all of them to hysterics. Gene actually seemed to choke on air, gasping out something to the effect of 'I can't believe _you_ said that' while Tony choked on the soda he'd been sipping. Pepper's incredulous face showed she was trying to pull herself together to say something snarky in response, but she couldn't get over the fact that Rhodey, who swore the least, used the biggest words and was the most polite person in her whole school, had just dropped the n-bomb. The redhead had to lean on Gene for support after a moment. Gene laughed into one of his hands to hide that 'we just did something horrible and I love it' grin that was plastered over both his and Tony's face. Rhodey smiled, reached for a can of Mountain Dew and was about to say something else when he heard a sound that made his blood run cold.

"James Rupert Rhodes!" his mother snarled, silencing all laughter in an instant. "What did you just say?"


	22. Introducing Seth

Author's Note: More proof, not that we needed any, that a happy family does not exist in my little world. But at least I avoided the common writing pitfall of making the black character's family perfect. I know lots of people do that because they don't want to write in a way that would be seen as racist, but I find it more unrealistic to act as if all black families have no problems. This holds true especially given how hard I've tried to stick with realism in this fic - I honestly can't bring myself to write everybody but Rhodey having problems, family issues and emotional rollercoasters to be overcome. I know I'm breaking the long standing fanfic writer tradition of 'black equals model citizen and perfect family'. I just realize that anyone who honestly thinks that race equals quality of family is someone I don't care about impressing.

* * *

_I try so hard, can't seem to get away from misery. Man, I try so hard, always be a victim of these dreams. It ain't my fault 'cause I try to get away and trouble follows me. Still I try so hard, hoping one day you'll come rescue me… _- I Tried by Bone Thugs

_Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied._ – Pearl S. Buck, 'What America Means to Me'

_Your loneliness is not your home – you're not alone. Not this time, don't go back. We are part of something more that seems to be just you and me, you and me._ – Golden (the English version) by Klee

* * *

It had been a very long time since he had been in New York City.

The whole place was the same as ever. Paranoid schizophrenics shouted that the world was ending while starving homeless people lamented their plight, willing to do absolutely anything for money. Latina girls chatted, swapping between their two languages of choice fluidly and flawlessly, their accents prickling at his ears. Gangsters white and black wore their colors proudly and eyed him warily, their baggy pants concealing weapons he knew they were very capable of using. This was not the clean cut part of NYC Rhodey lived in, but it was a shortcut to that part of town and he was more than capable of taking care of himself.

The shattered sidewalks and spider web cracked buildings reminded him of his childhood, the childhood Rhodey had mostly been saved from. He had been too little to remember when they lived in places like this with five people to an apartment meant for one. He didn't recall this culture, wanted nothing to do with it. Rhodey would not give the time of day to the young rapper on the corner trying to make money or the black church on the corner, the one where blacks sang like blacks and screamed, shouted and praised. Rhodey was too reformed for any of this because he'd been away from it for so long.

He was not above this. He was not on this level. He had never quite fit in anywhere, unlike his brothers. Quentin had been at home in the gangster world dealing coke and playing with guns. Rhodey had taken to upper-middle class life like a fish to water and was, in his brother Quentin's opinion, 'the whitest kid eva'. Of the three brothers only Seth had no place, forever walking the Earth and getting himself into trouble. Not Quentin's trouble where the cops got called in, the kind of trouble where the FBI, SHIELD and Interpol all ended up pissed with him. That was his world, politics, morals, theoreticals and violence. Not middle class, not lower class, not ghetto or rich man's land. He was not of this world.

Seth could tell you what each gang's color and dress code was, could make guesses as to the loyalties of all those he saw. He knew from a long hard look where the expensive suits of businessmen came from and if they had any kind of a dirty past he knew who they were. He could see the emptiness in the eyes of those who were smiling brightest and none of the conmen could fool him. The smells of alcohol and cigarette smoke wafted throughout neighborhood after neighborhood as if generated by sheer poorness rather than actual sources. Many a gangster eyed him warily but he made it to the subway untouched; there was something intimidating in a 6"7 black man in a trenchcoat and combat boots that repelled people like a plague. The cluster and crowd of New York parted for him like water. He was alone in the most densely populated city in North America.

On the subway he kicked a pickpocket hard enough to throw him backwards. He eyed his fellow passengers with suspicion and made a note that it was far too easy to get onto a crowded train with the weapons he had on him. If he was in the mood to he could've pipe-bombed this place without any trouble. And given that this was NYC there was definitely someone else here who was crazy and had the knowledge to make the damn thing. Man, he hated his life. You get too involved in certain fields and you begin to realize that nowhere is safe. National security was an oxymoron. The twenty year old man sighed, closing his eyes for a second to try to keep his mind on track. He felt weighted down just by being here. His mother's words rang in his ears. _I never want to see you in this city again._ Yet here he was.

Things were bad, but he was here. He was going to see his mother and Rhodey again out of sentimentality, a concept he thought he'd disregarded a very long time ago alongside God and Santa Claus. Truthfully, though, he missed his mother and his brother desperately. Rhodey was the kid she could be proud of, the one who was doing the right thing. How the hell such a good woman birthed such crazy-ass kids he'd never know. Someone as good as her didn't deserve such criminal children, even if Seth had always been a bit above Quentin in morality. After all, whether or not she agreed with Seth's political views the fact remained that Seth had good intentions and wanted to make the world a better place. Quentin was just a rap addicted gangster who thought he was the coolest person alive for doing such senseless, destructive, mindless things. Seth she could accept as misguided and good-hearted. How she even tried to deal with what Quentin had done, he'd never be sure. Mostly she focused on the only sane member of her family, the child she could ever love.

Rhodey, the world's whitest black boy. He went to a nice, calm little church, he went to a mostly white school, he didn't listen rap, and he spoke without excessive use of slang. The favored child, the good son. After producing a drug dealer and a black liberal extremist she'd finally gotten a good child, one she could be proud of. Rhodey didn't get arrested, Rhodey didn't have a room full of weapons and Rhodey certainly never did crack. Roberta had learned her lesson as a parent the hard way: raise your children to be smart, not political and never try to make them proud of black culture. Quentin was a direct result of what happened when rap videos overtook parents in importance and morals were taken from songs instead of people. Seth was self-aware enough to know he was just as bad from another direction, the result of someone too invested in the condition of the world, too extremely philosophical and political far too young.

But in her last son she had an opportunity to do better. Seth and Quentin were just past mistakes, abominations that could not be undone. Especially Seth, who had warrants out for him in several different countries at this point and a criminal record that was impressively disturbing. He didn't blame her for hating him. He didn't deserve to be a part of the Rhodes family; that was why he'd started going by a different last name midway through high school. He knew his place. So the question was, why was he even here?

She was not going to be happy with him. Roberta had never said outright that she hated him, but he knew that he'd never been forgiven for his actions in the past few years. He was supposed to take his pills and get better, not go off to Wakanda and start bringing down terrorists. The technology he'd stolen from Stark International – _from her_, let's not mince words – would've been illegal had there been any lies for something so advanced at the time. There's an awfully high death count that he's directly responsible for. The lives he had saved were cold comfort for her. He wasn't sure what she thought about the whole thing given he'd spent the last six months in some intense negotiations with SHIELD and under strict FBI surveillance. To be honest he wasn't sure why he was even going to try to make things right here. It was too late a long time ago, the first time she caught him with a gun in his hand. He knew that before he'd even set foot on Wakandan ground that he would never be welcomed into the Rhodes household again. Certain things couldn't be taken back.

Seth never knew how to do this, this homecoming nonsense. He had never been wanted or needed at home, never been the person his family enjoyed talking to. All he ever did was start fights and cause strife wherever he went. Home was a warzone where people screamed at each other, principals called constantly and it was always his fault. Their father couldn't even take the combined force of his three boys and had fled for his sanity's sake. Then it turned out Roberta couldn't handle them, either. She sent the two trouble making children away to live with their grandpa and kept Rhodey without any guilt or second thoughts. There had been virtually no visits or family moments past age eight for him. She got rid of the defectives and kept the functioning model. Why was he here? She wouldn't want to see him, not after all that he'd put her through; she'd had so much hope for him when she'd sent him to a better part of town. He had been so bright, so athletic and eerily intelligent. Unfortunately he was also outspoken and stubborn. He'd never been quite right.

They hadn't spoken in years. All he'd do is cause undo and unwanted stress right now. He ran a hand through his black, slicked back hair, thinking. The cut was a necessity in Wakanda where the heat was unbearable enough without a 'fro to add to it. It had yet to grow back and he pointedly avoided looking in any reflective surface as he exited the subway. He looked like everything she'd never wanted him to become; a radical semi-terrorist with a record, and that had been her fear ever since he was ten. Those first few arrests had been real hard on her even though no one else had seemed surprised. Everyone always knew Seth Rhodes was going to end up in prison. He was crazy Seth, who had an IQ of 185 and spoke three languages and built flamethrowers from household materials. This was inevitable. Only the person he'd have thought would be the most understanding, his own mother, didn't see it coming. He sighed to himself. _I never want to see you in this city again, although I'm sure I will on the news._ True words, true words…

SHIELD had decided to give him a clean slate given his actions in Wakanda. With a few highly experimental translator modules, a series of maps and some radio monitoring he had stopped an assassination and a war from happening, captured human traffickers and saved countless lives. The guerilla warfare involved was not something he was exposed to up close and personal for the most part, but he was the one who orchestrated it all. Without him Africa would be down the only stable and self-sufficient nation they'd ever produced. Some things were worth killing for, he explained to General Fury. He'd done it to try to save the last nation he thought was worth saving on this planet. Now he was free, all warrants and offences having been wiped from existence. For the first time in years Seth was free. He could've gone away somewhere, started over, never speak to her again. Part of him desperately wanted that path, to be free of all the fights and hatred between them, those cold words that could never be unspoken.

Yet he wouldn't be able to do it, not really. His family would haunt his mind, the broken relationships he never set right. First on the list will be apologizing to Roberta. After that there couldn't be a plan even in Seth's wildest dreams. He had never been good at telling how she'd react to anything. But she had tried to contact him constantly in the past year, although he'd been moving around too often to ever get her messages. He'd never been in the same place for more than a few weeks and even the FBI had a hard time tracking him. Of course, he had her phone number and he could've called if only he'd been able to work up the guts to do so. The truth was that he'd been up all night trying to steel his resolve. He barely registered anything on the walk to his house. He knew the streets of New York painfully well, having had to memorize so much of the city's layout long ago. There was a time where he'd run through these same alleys with his heart pounding in his chest as the police fired shots at him. No more. Never again.

He knocked on the door with a knot of tension tied thickly in his stomach. "Roberta?" he said softly when she answered. He looked at the group of teens behind her and realized he was interrupting something. All resolve seemed to die within him as he turned to leave. "I – you're busy, I'll go-"

"Seth!" Roberta grabbed his wrists eagerly. Her eyes and face betrayed a mixture of worry, amazement, love and regret. "No, no it's okay. Don't go. It's… it's been four years, oh baby look how tall you are… and how dirty. What did I tell you about cleaning your clothes?" she sounded on the verge of tears, nervous, and lost for words all at once.

"You're home," Rhodey whispered, looking as if he'd seen a ghost. His friends all collectively stepped back, as if sensing they were intruding upon something terribly intimate. "Oh my God…" it sounded like a prayer. Tears started to slide down his cheeks. "We thought you were dead – a-after the bombings in Wakanda, w-when we couldn't find you, we thought…"

Seth grinned nervously. "Well, uh, I got hurt. Not bad," he added to Roberta, who went pale at the thought. "I'm okay. I just couldn't get here 'til now. It's a long story." He shifted uneasily. "Ro- _mom_," he said, the word feeling foreign in his mouth, "I know you're busy, but can we talk?"

"Of course." She snapped out of her teary-eyed expression long enough to add to Rhodey, "Don't think you're off the hook, young man. That goes for you too, Gene. But for now I want everybody out. This is a family matter."

"Translation," Seth said coolly, smirking, "She want y'all out so she can cuss me out, tell me I'm an idiot, call me a nigger and then we'll hug, cry, share stories, yell at each other and make gumbo."

"That's ridiculous," Roberta muttered as she swiped at her eyes and walked toward the kitchen. "I made gumbo yesterday."


	23. Heaven And That Other Place

Author's Note: The good news is, the Whitney/Obadiah plot has been resolved and Whitney gets to go to Heaven, even if I don't call it that by name. The bad news is, I really liked the idea of Obadiah in Hell quite a lot and only just barely restrained myself from sending that cold hearted, cruel and vicious-tongued jerk there. I honestly had to be talked out of sending him there by several people.

_

* * *

Down on her knees, she wept on the floor, this hopeless life she wanted no more. Dead in her mind and cold to the bone, she opened her eyes and saw she was alone. She never found out how much I tried. All of the sadness she kept made me blind. She never found out how much I cried…_ - Love her by Seether

_Where there is the greatest love, there are always miracles. –_Willa Cather, author.

* * *

Well, he's really blown it now hasn't he?

Let's review his shortcomings, he thinks to himself as if this were a board meeting conducted entirely in his own head. Whitney has tried to end it all because she can't take all the pain anymore, all the abuse from the person she loves most. And it's all his fault and he can't deny that at all, not now. If he'd been mature about this instead of just being angry and abusive maybe none of this would've happened. He took out everything on her because she loved him so much she would take it, silently and without any resentment, and she'd be back for more every time. She loved him so much that she somehow managed to put up with this for years. He's a monster and she still loves him. He repaid her by being even worse to her.

If life were a job he'd fire himself. The fact that he's capable of thinking that kind of metaphor makes him want to scream, because he really needs to stop thinking about things in workplace terminology. He really is a terrible person, isn't he? No wonder Tony thinks he's capable of murder when this is his reaction to everything. Obadiah wonders when, exactly, he turned into such a monster. He could swear life used to be easier than this. There was a time he and Whitney weren't at odds with each other, when he had been a good enough parent that she didn't have to do insane things just to get his attention. He used to be kind to her, he used to be loving and gentle. They used to be close.

He was just so scared of that going the wrong way. He didn't want to hurt her, didn't want to get too close to her because ultimately it would just ruin both of them. And now suddenly he'd been handed a second chance. She seemed to have forgiven him yet again, laying waiting in the wings for his next move. She was too tired of being hurt to say anything to him, too afraid to come visit him, yet still her love remained. He had only wanted her to stop feeling like this so that she could be normal. Instead he'd broken her. Now she was functional again and the words couldn't be taken back; the confession had been spoken for better or worse. The feelings were still there, he knew, somewhere under the surface of it all, so what now? Being a workaholic, inattentive parent had been a disaster, but he…

He was a sick man, wasn't he? He wasn't right in the head, this wasn't right. He wasn't supposed to love her this much, fathers were never meant to cross this line, so he had to stay away. Staying away would hurt her. He couldn't do that. What was he supposed to do right now to make this better? He didn't want to see her desperate, insane and shaking anymore. He wanted her to be happy and he had no clue what to do to help her. Should he talk to her about this and try to work through this somehow, maybe with some kind of therapist? He wasn't sure if that was a good idea; it might just bring up more issues than could be solved and she didn't need anymore stress in her life right now.

Everything he could do would hurt her. All options would make her life harder. He didn't want to lose her, he couldn't take it. He came so close twice in a row that he's changed his whole set of priorities. He had to think long and hard about what he valued. His behavior has to change, he's aware of that. Clearly he can't just tell her he loves her and go about life like he doesn't. It wasn't even a cold comfort, it just hurt her even worse than no love at all. What he did, he realizes in retrospect, was rip out her heart and then try to heal it too. Life doesn't work that way. He knows that now.

The question is, where to go from here. How can he be a father that's nice enough not to drive her insane without being too close? They never really discussed it, all these feelings that are complicating their lives and plaguing their minds. It'd be one thing if he felt it and she didn't, then he could get therapy discreetly and move on, but she was the one who first put a voice to the love that dare not speak its name. Are they both crazy, then? How did this even happen to them in the first place? They started just being close as he tried to repair their broken relationship and it ended up like this. Then he'd ultimately done more damage than he'd repaired. Again, if he were to grade his performance and success level on this it'd be a streak of solid F's. He's failed her completely in the past. He must not fail her now.

He looks over all the things laid in front of him, his paperwork and formalities. He can't focus. Whitney's first day back to school was this day and he's itching to call her if everyone could leave him alone for long enough for him to make the call. For a moment he allows himself to close his eyes and imagine a world where he hadn't failed her. All his anger and viciousness, all that shame and revulsion he felt towards himself had been directed at her. She hadn't deserved it, she was just an innocent bystander caught in the middle of his sea of hate. All she'd wanted was to be loved. What has he done? Only she was able to tolerate how cruel, cold and vicious he was. Only she was able to stay with him through all his mood swings and madness. She has always been there for him, ever since he can remember. In return he ripped out her heart, froze it and shattered it over and over again.

He barely registers someone coming into the room. Only when the form shifts to reveal a super villain does he snap out of his train of thoughts. She shoots him. As it all goes black and the world explodes with pain and fire, she kneels beside him and takes off the mask. Tears are streaming down her cheeks. "Whitney?" It's all going cold. He can't move. She wraps her arms around his neck and lays her body on top of his on the floor, still crying hysterically.

"It'll all be over soon, Daddy. It'll be over and it won't hurt anymore," she whispers to him as he fades out of existence. "It's over…"

He deserves this, he knows he does. He deserves this after everything he's done to her. How did he become such a disgusting, vile and sadistic person? How could he destroy the only person he'd ever loved like this? He wasn't angry with her, not at all. He had earned this death. Closing his eyes, he let the coldness overtake him entirely, wishing he could do it all over again. If only he had a second chance he wouldn't be this unfeeling monstrosity that he'd become – screw laws and society, the pressure of those things did not excuse his actions. Fear for his reputation was not an excuse to break and abuse his daughter, he could have at least been there for her when she needed him. _Dear God,_ he thinks to himself, _what have I done?_

_You have committed the world's worst crime, a voice answers him, sounding neither male nor female, neither angry nor accepting. You have been a hateful, greedy, prideful man the likes of which has not been seen in a very long time and you absolutely deserve to go to the darkest and most painful parts of the afterlife for what you've done._

He says nothing, fully aware that that's true.

_However, your daughter very much wants you not to go there. She loves you, because love is blind and foolish and far too forgiving for it's own good. So you aren't going anywhere bad, though believe me we all wish you were. You certainly earned your way into the darkness and yet your daughter could never rest in peace knowing that was where you were. You will reside in a good place in the afterlife – but a good place far, far away from your daughter, because you have hurt her too many times to ever be given another chance. At her insistence, you two will be able to say goodbye. Do not argue; Whitney had to yell scream and rant before this much was even conceded. You truly had a remarkable soul mate, Obadiah Stane. It's rather pitiful that such a good woman was wasted on such a wicked man._

He can't argue with that, so he just whispers his thanks for being able to say goodbye. Then it all goes white and warm, and suddenly Whitney's there beside him. She looks more peaceful than he's ever seen her. The world is golden and made of light; her hair glows, her eyes are filled with joy and everything seems surreal and yet undeniably real. She turns to him and smiles serenely. It's as if a great weight had been lifted from her and she is truly free of it all.

"It's over," she says, and leans back into his arms. "It's over and you'll never hurt me again. I'm…" tears are in her eyes. "I'm gonna be okay now. It's all going to be okay. Even for you, Daddy. I made sure of it."

"I'm sorry," he manages, and then she pulls away, looking sad and happy all at once. There's someone calling for her. "I'm so sorry, Whit."

"It's okay," she says calmly. "It's over now."

And then she vanishes, leaving him alone in a perfect world that he cannot stand simply because she isn't in it. Wherever he is is hell without her, and he can't object to it since he knows in his heart that he's earned all this. He sinks to his knees, crying, and though he senses people, spirits and voices all around him, he doesn't hear their words, too lost in his grief and guilt to care. He is in Hell, a version of it he engineered and created long ago. His life, his problems, everything is over and done now. If life were a job he's been fired for the good of the world. He feels none of the bliss everyone around him feels. He feels none of their joy.

He simply feels nothing, and that is the worst pain of all.


	24. Mood Whiplash

Author's Note: This was intended to be one chapter, but it got so long that I divided it in half. Otherwise it just would've gone on and on and I'm attempting to keep the chapters in this fic similar in length. And yes, I know that I really should get to the Tales of Suspense chapters because that's what you're all waiting for. Sorry. But at least this is upbeat. Well, upbeat for _me_, anyway.

* * *

_Life is a rollercoaster. We go up and down from joyous to depressed and back over and over again. Just like with the rollercoaster, some people cling to the safety bar for dear life while others throw up their hands – safety be damned – and the only thing you know for certain getting on the thing is that the ride will eventually stop. The good news is, life is _not_ like a rollercoaster in one aspect: there will be no barfing after it's over._ – American philosopher/comedian Jon Roland

_Happiness is not perfected until it is shared._ – James Porter

* * *

Rhodey had a family.

That was absolutely nothing to be jealous over. The hugs, the love, the warmth were all good things. It was great to see them talking, sharing, rebuilding their shattered bonds. It was wonderful to see the Rhodes family come together like this. This was all Rhodey had ever wanted – peace between his mother and brother. No more yelling, no more political and social arguments, just a normal family moment, and Tony thought he understood. He knew he ought to be happy for him. He was. So why did seeing them like this make him want to scream? It hurt to look at them when they were like this. He reached for the vodka he had stashed in his mattress and wanted to break the bottle when he realized it was empty.

It was all starting to feel cold and bleak again. He didn't want that, he couldn't take it. Tony tried to think back to that psuedo-AA meeting he'd been to. He'd spent the whole time tuning out everyone, bored and anxious. But they'd said a few things that had stuck with him simply due to the fact they had some good advice. One of those tips was that being alone when he wanted to drink wasn't a good idea. He'd sit here and obsess over it if he did that. On that subject, at least, their advice was perfectly valid. So who did he go to? Rhodey was preoccupied and Pepper didn't answer when he texted her. The brunette frowned to himself. Gene wasn't answering his phone either. The thought that the two of them were together made him want to punch a wall, and he didn't know why.

Maybe it was because Gene had a much, much better chance at romance with Pepper than Tony did. If she ever knew what he'd done she wouldn't, couldn't forgive him. It was hard for him to even forgive himself in his own head; to other people he knew he really looked like a complete psycho. Gene may have been a lot like Tony, but he didn't have blood on his hands. Tony tried to picture someone as mellow and cool as Gene doing what he'd done and he couldn't. That fact meant that at the end of the day Pepper would choose the Chinese boy over Tony and it would be completely sane of her to do so. If she ever found out she'd leave him and that would be absolutely, totally reasonable given what he'd done.

When all was said and done he'd be all alone, just like he always was. Right now he felt like the only person on the planet. He needed to leave, go somewhere, be with people. He couldn't intrude on Rhodey's family moment. Tears and laughter and swear words reached his ears, the intermingling of people who loved and despised one another. It was like a knife in his chest. Tony exited the house without being noticed, immediately deciding against working on the armor since that only gave him more time to think when he needed less. He couldn't go see Whitney in the hospital; security was so tight around the fallen Madame Mask that even in Iron Man form he couldn't get in there. He couldn't go to Pepper's or Gene's when he knew he'd wind up interrupting them. They deserved to hang out without him barging in just because he was bored, lonely and socially inept.

The wind was cool and the evening's light made the world glow gold despite the crisp fall night. He had managed to remember to bring his jacket; Rhodey's constant mothering of him seemed to finally be working. Tony repressed the urge to chuckle at the thought. _I have three moms: Rhodey, Roberta and occasionally Pepper. Please dear God, don't let Seth be another mom. I have enough of that as it is._ He tried to picture Seth, 6"7, muscular and badass being motherly. The resulting mental image of him in an apron made him wince, wishing there was a way to unsee it. His own mind scared him sometimes, it really did. He tried to focus on something else, anything else. There were always the various dance clubs playing terrible music that Pepper was always trying to drag him to. Maybe he could see what all the fuss was about, since Whitney had been all for them as well despite being nothing like Pepper. Maybe it was a girl thing.

As always when this happened, he was keenly aware of how separated and different he was from other kids his age. It had to be that way, because if he was around people he'd hurt them, and he'd learned to stay away from other kids when he was very young. After what happened to his mother he'd lost all trust in himself. He didn't dare get too close to people, not when he knew what he was capable of. Fast forward a few years and somehow he'd turned into a genius who had to be told what everyday things like rap and clubs were. This wasn't what his father had wanted, although he'd known the reason why Tony isolated himself. Still, it was always a painful reminder of how not right he was when he didn't know basic things like this.

His first thought: he didn't get it. The music was blasting to the point where the words were garbled, it was so crowded that he could hardly move without jostling into someone, and it was dark save for flashing lights that made him more disoriented and annoyed than turned on despite the sexually charged music. His second thought was that all of this crap was immediately and completely forgiven because all the girls were wearing very, very wonderful outfits. There were black girls in neon colors that contrasted electrically with their skin, there were girls with so much intricately done glow in the dark make up on that he couldn't tell what their skin color was, and there were girls in mini-skirts with words written on them. Did he get why anyone would want to be in a sweaty, smelly, poorly lit club? No. Did he get why someone would want to be in a sweaty, smelly, poorly lit club on a night when there was a sea of girls? _Absolutely_.

He heard laughter behind him and turned. There was a girl, vaguely familiar to him, smiling warmly at him. He could swear he knew her from school, though he couldn't remember her name. She got close enough to be heard over the music and asked teasingly, "First time in a club?"

"No!" his cheeks turned red. "Well, yeah," he admitted when she crossed her arms and quirked an eyebrow at him in disbelief. "That obvious, huh?" he had to smile at his own social ineptitude. "Hey, don't I know you?"

"I'm in some of your classes – Science and Social Studies, I think," she replied, voice just discernable over the racket. "You're Tony Stark, right? The kid who always skips school."

That this was his defining feature to his other students made Tony groan, though he wasn't sure whether to laugh or get mad at it. If they only knew – but then again, to them it probably did look like he was always skipping school for no good reason. She didn't seem to mean anything by it, and didn't look disapproving. He grinned sheepishly at her. So he was school-skipping Tony to everyone outside his circle of friends? It made him sound like a jerk, though he couldn't find any lie in her statement. Under the pulsing lights with everyone laughing and smiling all around him it was hard to get angry for long, and she seemed to be more amused with his behavior than anything.

"You don't know how to dance, do you?" she asked like it was a fact. Apparently everyone also knew he was socially incompetent. _More great news,_ he thought dryly as he nodded. She grabbed his hand and pulled him out onto the dance floor, where the music swelled to incomprehensible, painful levels. He read her lips without hearing the sound. "Let me teach you or you're not getting any," she grinned, gesturing with her head to a group of pretty socialite girls in the corner. Instantly she became Tony's new best friend because Rhodey and Pepper hated it when he tried to impress girls. Finally someone who agreed with him that he was long overdue to get some action! He may not have known her name but he _loved_ her now.

Dancing seemed to be simple enough. If he could learn fighting moves, he could learn to move in time to music. His newfound BFF (yes, all it takes to be Tony Stark's best friend forever is to help him get girls) had to teach him how to move less stiffly and abruptly. It was a leftover thing from combat, he thought, just something that tended to develop when moving in a heavy metal suit all the time. His movements were noticeably clunkier than anyone else's, though at least he had enough experience in combat that he was good at dodging other people. _I'm new,_ Tony thought after the third time someone knocked into him, _but what's their excuse? Freaking tools._ He didn't even realize he'd spoken out loud until his dance partner laughed out loud and mouthed 'tools?' incredulously at him.

Eventually, he managed to convince a series of girls to dance with him. Four of them identified him as the kid who skipped school all the time, which stopped being funny after the first three people said it. Though most girls seemed to like him well enough, they weren't exactly falling over themselves to dance with the school skipper/nerd. Those from other schools thought of him purely as 'the nice guy' and ditched him at the first opportunity for someone else. An hour of this and he found his first dance partner, smiling warmly at him like she was waiting for him, and gratefully allowed himself to be led to the other side of the dance floor. The lights were less abrasive here and the music was a less overwhelming. A slow song struck up, saving his sore and tired body from having to keep moving any longer as he fought down the urge to glare at the girls who'd turned him down.

"Ignore them, Tony," she said to him as she wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned in. Slow dancing was apparently code for holding one another and rocking back and forth for a few minutes. "It's no big deal. Everybody gets turned down."

The brunette rolled his eyes and groaned. "Please, just don't. I don't need any more moms in my life." He paused. "And I never caught your name."

"Jagvi," she replied softly. "And I'm not trying to mother you. It's just the truth – first time dancers don't get a lot of action. At least you didn't set anyone on fire like your friend Pepper did the first time she was here."

His jaw dropped. "She did what?"

"You don't know?" Jagvi grinned. "She's famous for it. It was an accident, mind you," she added hastily, giving him a warning sort of look. "She didn't mean to. And I think most of the burn scars are gone now. They're doing mighty things with skin grafts nowadays."

Tony immediately led Jagvi off the dance floor, got them drinks and demanded the whole story. She had a laugh like ringing bells and reminded him multiple times that Pepper never meant to hurt anybody. He could barely restrain himself from screaming 'tell me what happened!' at her as she explained large amounts of background information. It boiled down to a simple lack of coordination on Pepper's part. Once she knocked into a giant lava lamp and shattered it, the highly flammable liquid and large bits of glass got all over a nearby dancer's lower body. Someone else had been smoking and when they had dropped their cigarette… Well, as Jagvi said, medical technology was a marvelous thing and it was just an accident. And the guy in question had met his new girlfriend who he was now engaged to in the emergency room. The moral of the story, Jagvi said with a laugh, was that good things come out of horrifying accidents. Tony raised his glass to her in a toast.

Not that they were mocking Pepper. Tony was fascinated and Jagvi just thought it was funny. One tale of dance floor mishaps led to a long string of them. Apparently dancing was far more dangerous than Tony had ever given it credit for being; once upon a time three people had gotten their Tripp pants so tangled up they all had to take them off and walk home pantsless. Another time someone had brought balloons to be bounced around – which was typical when it was someone's birthday – and had put baby powder in some of the balloons. When popped, the balloons managed to take out a dozen people each. Then there was the time Jagvi's older brother had made barfing noises and poured a can of soup over the balcony.

Tony laughed so hard his ribs hurt. He didn't even notice or realize that his desperate need to go get drunk had vanished, nor did he realize how his loneliness had vanished until Jagvi set him up to dance with one of her friends, then another and then another. One of them taught him how to spin a girl, another taught him how to spin himself and a girl at the same time, and a third attempted to teach Tony some salsa moves. He kept ruining it by giving her suggestive looks and making comments about how sexy he was; she ended in his arms laughing hysterically at his over-the-top fake Brazilian accent. Jagvi shouted something about him 'getting some' and just made her friend's laughter worse.

At some point he and Jagvi found themselves exiting the club for much needed food. Dancing for three hours built up an appetite. Funny, it never looked so physically intensive on TV. Tony wondered if this was one of those things normal kids knew that he didn't. Oh well. He was more than content to let Jagvi lead the way. He scarcely knew her, but he trusted her. There was something good and kind in her eyes and voice, something positive and upbeat that was intoxicating. He'd seen that same quality in Pepper and it was enough for him. Rhodey had a tendency to keep him away from this part of normal teenage life, the part involving staying out all night and meeting new people. This was probably out of concern for Tony's drinking problem, but that didn't make it any less annoying. It felt good to be out and about like a normal person with no Rhodey to correct his every conversational mistake. Jagvi had bangles up to her elbows on both arms like armor and smelled like lavender; he was at perfect ease with her.

They hit up the nearest Chinese restaurant and the conversation turned to gossip and reputations. Apparently Tony was suspected of being a drug user, a spy or secretly a super villain depending on which person her asked. Most people thought he was addicted to something of some sort, though apparently everybody in his Science class thought he was dating the advanced chemistry teacher, Ms. Dubois. After all, whenever he skipped school she had a free period. After choking on his drink, Tony protested that if he was going to date a teacher, he'd prefer a more technologically-minded branch of science to he their main focus. An astrophysicist, he said after some thought, maybe a neurosurgeon. It'd give them interesting things to talk about.

"So what you're saying is, nerds date nerds?" Jagvi asked teasingly. "Shame. I thought you and Rashmi were getting along well."

"I nearly killed her. _With laughter._ Good God, I thought she was going to pass out or something." He shook his head, taking a bite of his almond chicken. Smiling, he added, "Now I know why Pepper always wanted to go dancing. I thought she was just asking because another girl asked me first, but it's actually pretty fun."

The Indian girl nodded, idly pushing her messy pixie cut blue-black hair out of her eyes. "Pepper usually goes to Club Light across town. Lots of bright colors and happy-hardcore music, you know, cheerful stuff. She's been pretty obsessed with the happy-hardcore dance scene ever since her mom died; I guess it helps – why are you staring at me like that?"

Tony had frozen, fork midway to his mouth. His eyes were wide. "Her mom's dead?"

Jagvi looked at him incredulously. "You don't know? But you're her best friend, aren't you? I mean, I see you two together all the time… Tony, Pepper's mother killed herself five months ago."


	25. Hidden Depths

Author's Note: First off, a quick note to my reviewers. Firstly, now I'll never be able to listen to Linkin Park without thinking about fanfic. XD Secondly, since someone asked, I feel I should clarify that Jagvi isn't going to be getting together with Tony. I just felt that he needed a friend outside his tiny inner circle and she was an OC I already had prepared for another fandom. They're just friends. Admittedly, they've got a _strange_ friendship and Jagvi's an odd person, but they're buddies nonetheless.

Also, I apologize if this seems short. (Just remember, it used to be smooshed with the last chapter to be a single long one.)

* * *

_If you smile through the pain long enough, everyone becomes convinced you have no pain. If you act cheerful long enough you therefore begin to realize no one knows the real you, just the air you project, and by direct consequence no one really cares about you, the real you. But you don't dare be honest for fear of losing the affections of the world, so you never let them see you sweat, never let them see you cry, until finally you awake one day to find you can't do these things even in private. This is called dying internally, and it's why I'm here._ – Comedian Larry Butler, while in the hospital for a suicide attempt.

* * *

"I want you to know that normally, I do _not_ relay this story to anyone. Partly 'cause the whole of her old public school knows and I don't want her new one to turn into the clusterfuck that her last one was. I've heard things, Stark. She got it bad over there, enough that she transferred. And on the sliding scale of high school seriousness, that is very high. So normally I'd keep this under lock and key." Jagvi paused to take a swig of her tea. "But you and Pepper are constantly together. You're close. It's obvious that she really likes you and you two have that freaky, schmoopy family-close bond that you and Rhodey have. I'll tell you what happened if you want. But you're only getting told once, understood? And if you tell anyone I can have people after you in ways you can scarcely imagine."

He recognized the threat for what it was: concern and compassion. He nodded at her, food forgotten, scanning the now mostly empty restaurant. There was an elderly couple in the corner. Except for them, they were alone. He sat as if paralyzed, watching Jagvi's every movement. Her eyes were the color of a desert sky and the intensity of her gaze made him panic. Pepper… poor Pepper. He only wanted to know what had happened because he loved her and he was suddenly very scared for her. What had happened? Was she going to be okay? Why had she transferred? Pepper…

"Pepper used to go by Patzi as her nickname. She used to be a pretty normal kid, I guess. I've seen pictures of her from her old school's paper. She used to have hair down to her butt and she was on the school soccer team, the paper, the yearbook, and of course volleyball. Girl can _jump_, y'know? And even if I wasn't there it's pretty obvious looking back at the yearbook for her last year there that she was a jockette. A prep. Whatever you call it – a popular girl with a lot of friends who spent her time playing, laughing and having fun. The kind of kid most of us don't pay much attention to.

Her mom was a SHIELD agent. Best of the best. Top tier. She worked with Nick Fury and she made the news, the _real_ news, not tiny papers at high schools. She was pretty awesome from what I could tell. She had a flame red crew cut and spoke five languages. For the most part she was a certifiable badass. Patzi idolized her. She wanted to be just like her. That's not unusual for SHEILD kids. Again, she wasn't someone anyone would really think twice about other than to say she was a nice girl. Then it all sort of crashed down at the start of May when the press found out her mom was having an affair with Nick Fury himself."

Tony choked on air. He tried to picture solemn, heartless General Fury loving anyone and it just about broke his brain. Jagvi pushed his water towards him and waited for him to process how weird that last sentence was. Apparently he was far from the first person to find the affair jaw droppingly strange. She shook her head as she continued.

"I'm not saying I understand the damn thing. I think I get how they kept everybody in the dark – the Helicarrier is a pretty private place – but I don't get why they'd wanna – look, Tony, I'm just reviewing the past, I don't get it, okay?" She shook her head and took a sip of soda. "Love is one fucked up thing, if you'll pardon the language. But anyway, she and Fury got caught and while the mainstream newspapers didn't really cover it but once, the tabloids ran with it. Overnight Patzi found herself the target of everybody's mockery, all these skeezy low-brow reporters, and constant questions. Everybody laughed at her or avoided her like the plague. She went from the most popular girl on Earth to someone nobody would be caught dead with in a week flat. Her boyfriend dumped her, the soccer captain found some reason to boot her, and her parents were probably at each other's throats the whole time.

Nobody really knows what happened, but a week after the affair went public her mom killed herself. It was pretty gruesome; I'd rather not go into details. I'll leave that to Pepper, if she wants to tell you. All you need to know is that after that her life became a living nightmare. Everybody turned on her. The popular kids didn't want to be seen with her because of what happened and the losers didn't want to be near a former jockette. She was all alone and the teasing just got worse and worse until finally one day she just kind of lost it and started skipping school altogether. She spent all her nights at rave clubs, the kind where everybody's high and the music makes no sense whatsoever. One day she came home high as a kite with her hair cut short and her dad transferred her out of her old school after that. And that's all I know." Jagvi hadn't taken her eyes off him the whole time. "There's more to it than that, of course, but I think everybody's just trying to let her move on. Maybe kids at our school aren't as cruel as the kids at her last one. Maybe it's because only some people know. But I think everybody's decided to just let it go."

Her voice went from soft to harsh. "And you should let it go too, Stark. She's had enough questions about her personal life as it is. I told you what happened because she's your friend, but you should really try your best not to bring it up. She's trying to put this behind her, Tony. She's a different person now, I think it's been months since she's been high and she seems to be quitting the rave scene altogether. You should know her past, but you shouldn't judge her for it. After all, we're all guilty of something, aren't we?"

He didn't meet her eyes. There was a knowing look to them that made him feel naked and exposed, as if she knew somehow the secret he kept inside. That was impossible, of course. But it struck him as unfair that he knew Pepper's entire life now, personal demons and all, and she didn't know anything about him, the real him. He nodded absently at Jagvi and paid for their food, exchanging phone numbers and promises to hang out sometime. He was barely paying attention as he made his way home. His mind was spinning. Tony tried to picture Pepper high, Pepper as a jock girl, Pepper being teased so viciously she couldn't take going to school anymore. He was not so blind to his own flaws that he couldn't see the irony.

Nobody around him knew who he was… and he didn't know them, either.


	26. Stoned In Love

Author's Note: Dammit, cookiesnmilk, now every time I hear that song I'm going to think of Iron Man. Although I can hardly complain given that each character has their own playlist on my iTunes already; some fics just go well to music, I suppose.

And BTW, my faithful readers, next chapter begins the clusterbomb of insanity that is Tales of Suspense aka the season finale. I had some other chapters I wished I could've done, but I know it'd be more filler than anything and you're all waiting for the shit to hit the fan already. Well, that wish will be granted very shortly (probably later today).

* * *

_Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and Butterfingers. These things are the reasons why I get up in the morning. Oh! And jellybeans and chocolate milk, too!_ – Rufus Wainwright, singer and songwriter.

_What we had was dirty, disgusting, wrong and sick. You tainted me, forever ruined a part of me, made me grow up too fast, and just generally fucked with my life. And I want you back, goddamit! I missed you!_ – Takumi, to his ex-girlfriend during the ending chapter of the fourth volume of Kestuban Taukmi.

* * *

Pepper was high.

Higher than a satellite. Higher than the moon. Over the stars she went, way over into tomorrow. She was well aware that her father wouldn't be home for a couple of days, so she locked away her cell phone and laid down on her bed to ride it out. She was serenely floating somewhere in the space between her body and the ceiling, drifting without a thought or a care. Her sore and aching body lay motionless on the bed as if in sleep, but her eyes were open and she could see. She saw the posters on the wall, the lights on the ceiling. She saw the sheer emptiness and felt okay simply because her mind was finally, finally slowing down.

All her life she had been plagued by thoughts. Constant, a stream of thoughts, a whole fleet of trains of thoughts. Every little thing that she saw or that happened got replayed over and over again in her head a hundred times a minute. Ideas bloomed forth faster than they could be written, plans formed in a heartbeat, theories, accusations and emotions whirlwinded around in her head until she could no longer think or even breathe. She got so sick of having two text conversations while talking to someone out loud, but to not do these things would result only in the backlog of unspoken thoughts becoming too much to bear. She couldn't stop thinking, never stopped moving, always was planning, plotting, reviewing, asking, wondering. Pepper was drowning in her own mind.

Once upon a time there had been a bunch of people she could talk to so the load wouldn't get so unbearable. Those girls, her so called best friends forever, were all gone from her life without a trace now. They didn't care if she lived or died. The only friend she'd made at her new school was Rhodey, because he seemed to understand all her rapid fire dialogue and on some level he felt sorry for her. She always was alone with her thoughts and endless notebooks filled with drawings and scribbled thoughts, her rants and musings that were so long and complex no one else understood them. Not that he understood her very well, himself. He just thought of her as a spazz. They all did.

But in this moment she could not care less. In this moment the thoughts left. There was, for the first time in a long time, peace and quiet in her mind. She laid unmoving, focusing on her breathing, willing it all to stay silent. Her mind was always the worst after big events. Whitney and Obadiah's death alone had robbed her of sleep for the past thirty six hours; Rhodey's brother coming home would make it a solid forty eight unless she did something to medicate herself. The sleeping pills her father normally kept in the bathroom cabinet were gone. They were officially out. She had two options. She could stay up all night going stir crazy with raw energy and write down pages and pages of speculation on all the major events that were going on in her life, or she could get high, lay on her thick velvet comforter and finally get some sleep. She chose the latter. She was tired.

She was always at war with herself. There was the constantly active, never ceasing streams (stream_s_, multiple) of consciousness that compelled her to do things, write things, text things, talk about things. Then there was her frail mortal body that begged the mind to please, please shut up. Her body begged her mind for sleep, for surrender, to just get a few hours a day. Her mind refused and kept going and going and going. She'd tried running until she was exhausted, tried talking to everyone until they got sick of her, and still there was nothing that could make sleep come easily, not for her. She pressed herself into her comforter and noted how awesome everything was. She was free. She was high.

Snuggled in her bed, she thought slow and soft thoughts. They did not suffocate her, choke her, rip her heart out and send her up and down and emotional rollercoaster. There was only a single train of thought. Rhodey, Gene and Tony… what would they think of her if they saw her like this? She didn't want them to know what she did. Maybe Tony would understand, he drank, after all, but Gene and Rhodey didn't and they wouldn't. She pictured Rhodey high and laughed; he'd probably be the responsible one even then, the adorable jackass. And Gene would be so cute all relaxed and happy for once instead of being all cool and collected. She giggled in that way only a stoned person can and thought of better days, days gone by, that week she'd skipped school to hang out with Shoutan.

She sat up, looking into a mirror. Shoutan had cut her hair. He'd been high as a kite and rambling about her needing a fresh start. "New clothes!" he'd yelled suddenly, as if he'd just had a revelation. "A new haircut! A new name! You could start it all over!" And he'd pulled out the scissors and kept rambling about it. They'd huffed paint so they were talkative spastic high, not stoned and calm high, and he'd cut her hair off with such enthusiasm and good will that she'd just watched him. She had sat serenely on his roof awaiting the transformation's completion. He'd loaned her some of his clothes, stripped her and changed her in his room and marched her to the bathroom, rubbing off her make up and talking nonstop.

She hadn't recognized herself. She had been totally different. She stood there in a long gray T-shirt and black cut off shorts, a tie slung around her neck, head feeling strangely light without her hair. She was transfixed. She reached out to touch the mirror, feeling a growing sense of hope as happy, hysterical tears slid down her cheeks. She laughed hysterically and tackled him, kissing him with such enthusiasm she knocked him over. Then she laughed on the floor as he ran his hands through her hair and declared her transformation complete. They had there own party to celebrate, running around his house high as kites. She wore everything in his closet at least once and by the time she got home she didn't know whose clothes she was wearing, only that she was deliriously happy. Parker Shoutan was a genius and she loved him and her life was going to be great from now on if she managed to get home in one piece.

Pepper had fallen into her father's arms and sobbed and laughed and rambled. Sobbed about how hard it all was and how sick she was of her school. Laughed about how stupid she was, how shallow. Rambled about Shoutan's idea ("That stoner kid?" her father had asked disapprovingly, but she'd ignored him) and how she just wished she could do it all over again. Wished. But her father would never let her do that, he'd always been the parent who was too busy with work to care. It was like he had something against her. An insane theory that Shoutan had mumbled came roaring back. High and painfully not, drifting and yet all too aware, she had grabbed her father by the shoulders.

"Is Nick Fury my father?" she'd half asked, half shrieked, and the way he froze made her realize even in her present state of mind that she wasn't supposed to know. "Wait, that doesn't make sense. He's black. I'm not. I have _freckles_!" she had declared, now swaying slightly, and she'd giggled because her act was working and her dad didn't know she knew anymore but she did. She totally did, but his face went all relaxed and grateful and he muttered 'thank God' under his breath as he ushered her to her room. He didn't know she knew. Nobody knew she knew.

If anyone knew that she knew, her life would just get more complicated. She didn't want that. She wanted things to get better and less insane. Shoutan's idea went through. She got a fresh start. Her father seemed to be more worried about her than anything else – he wasn't mad at her or even annoyed at all the laws she'd broken. He was just worried sick. He asked her if he remembered anything from that night and she had said no. He'd forbidden her from hanging out with Shoutan and any of his drug using friends and she'd agreed to that purely because Shoutan had run away from home and nobody knew where he was anymore. She wondered about him but, well, with his parents… Anyway, she just hoped she was living up to this brilliant second chance plan of his. He'd made it sound so simple, so beautiful, a new chance and a new hope. Did he know she'd take him up on his offer? Probably not, but he didn't realize his own intelligence most of the time.

She was doing pretty good, she thought. She'd weaned herself off virtually everything. She only needed a little bit of something every once a month or so. She was getting better, little by little. One day she'd be able to function without anything else at all. Pepper lay back and thought of the future, of all the things she could now do. Things were increasingly crazy with Tony and Rhodey, Iron Man and the Makluan Rings, and yet that was surprisingly okay simply because it was all so surreal. Heroes, technology, fifty foot growing metal creatures and magic rings were things she could deal with. It was the mundane, everyday life, being _normal_ that had become suffocating to her ever since her mother died. Her normal life was hell. Her personal life was a nightmare.

So she escaped into a perfect world, or at least a better one. She threw it all away and had started over as Pepper instead of Patzi and had forced her way into a small tightly knit circle of friends. She left behind the hell and the nightmare of the past to throw herself whole heartedly into the future. She didn't need mundane reality. She couldn't stand mundane life. She needed excitement and insanity, and ever since she found out Tony was Iron Man her life had become increasingly surreal and dramatic. She needed that; it was a good way to avoid dealing with what she'd done and what had happened before. With the present so unpredictable and exciting Patzi, her old school and all the pain she'd suffered were thrown out the window, forgotten entirely, and that was how Pepper wanted it.

There was the feeling sometimes that no one knew her. No one really knew everything she'd done, who her actual father was, what had happened to drive her to this. Everybody knew that drugs and bullying had been involved, but no one could know those details that she kept secret. No one knew that she and Shoutan had been getting high in secret together ever since middle school, knew that many times when she said she was at a friend's house she was laying on his couch high on anything he had laying around – and he had plenty of things laying around – and no one even had the tiniest inkling that they'd been a couple. No one would ever believe cold, scarred, cynical Shoutan and light hearted, bubbly popular girl Patzi had been having sex all throughout their high school years. No one knew that she'd lay there with him afterwards and talk about getting him out of this hellhole of a life he'd been living for so long. It was all talk. They knew his father held too much power over the police to ever be caught – who would dare to arrest the Chief of Police?

Eventually it had all come crumbling down. She had no idea what his father did, but Shoutan had run off, apparently deciding homelessness was better than living with him. Pepper agreed. She just wished he'd said goodbye or stopped to tell her where he was going, although she wasn't sure how safe that was with what a psychopath his father was. Maybe he was trying to keep her safe, maybe it was so that when the police had asked her she had been able to honestly say she hadn't a clue where he was. Maybe he was trying to give her a fresh start. She didn't know, but she trusted him. He had to have his reasons. She suspected things were so bad that he had to lay low for a while. And when he did reappear she would bring the full force of Iron Man down on him. Who would dare to arrest the head of the NYCPD? Iron Man would. A citizen's arrest with a metric ton of evidence only she and Shoutan would be able to lead him to.

Then she'd tell Tony, Rhodey and Gene all her secrets, the whole of the past, both her's and Shoutan's. And they would accept her because she'd mostly cleaned up with just a few lapses and she was getting better. They'd accept her because they were forgiving people, kind hearted human beings with a soft spot for her. They would probably, hopefully, eventually be able to forgive Shoutan for being both her boyfriend and a druggie when they knew his side of the story. One day it'd all be alright, and all the men in her life would be friends with each other. She'd have a circle of trustworthy men instead of her former, treacherous, back stabbing circle of teenage girls, which was a mistake she'd never make again. No, she'd learned her lesson that all the people who were there for her were always guys; she'd yet to be stabbed in the back by one of them. And one day they'd all meet and become like brothers.

Later, Pepper wouldn't remember if she was high or semi-sober at the time she thought that particular daydream up, but in retrospect she could have not have been more wrong about everything if she'd tried.


	27. Season One Finale

Author's Notes: And now we hit the Tales of Suspense chapters. If you haven't seen those episodes this will make no sense; **this is meant as an accompaniment to those eps, not a description of the events itself.** I'm filling in the blanks of what's going on off screen. Without prior knowledge of the season finale the timeline and the bulk of the plot will make no sense to you. And obviously, if you haven't seen the end of season one you aren't going to want to be spoiled, so turn back now.

* * *

_I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite._ – Friedrich Nietzsche

_Revenge is like a poison. It can take you over, and before you know it you've turned into something ugly._ – Aunt May, Spider-Man 3

* * *

Zhang is a talented man, or at least, he likes to think so.

His words can cut through Gene to the bone. He knows how to say just the right thing to undo people, to voice their insecurities and give them reason to think the worst has yet to come. He can ask armor piercing questions. He can make off handed remarks that haunt his enemies late at night. He can see the inner workings of people, the questions in their hearts and heads, the doubts and fears that they keep inside. He uses and abuses this ability, cuts down everyone he deems a threat. All he needed to do was break Gene Khan. He's aware it's not an easy task.

Firstly, even with Gene captured and the rings taken from him, the boy is still not despairing. He's plotting. His mind is whirring at a thousand miles a minute attempting to plot trick and fight his way out of this. It's useless, but it represents a spirit of hope that he shouldn't have right now given that his world is crumbling all around him. Secondly there's the issue of everyone here overhearing the blackmail and psychological warfare Zhang is about to wage on him. He cannot allow them to be overheard. That said, they really do need to go get Stark and have the American boy – who is far more deserving of the rings than Gene ever thought of being – to get the last ring. Zhang is a resourceful person in spite of the unpleasant circumstances, and speaks to Gene in rough, thickly accented Mongolian. Temugin's native tongue is repulsive but it is attention grabbing; the boy looks at him with fiery hate in his eyes.

Perfect. "Temugin, you know you are only alive right now due to my mercy. Any plans of escape you may be hatching will only result in your death."

"You need me to get the ring," Gene shoots back angrily. "As the true heir of the Mandarin-"

"Tony Stark could get the ring. I trust in his character far more than I do yours." The words make the Mongolian boy's eyes widen by a fraction of an inch. That means Zhang's words have struck home. "Furthermore, you are not the true heir of the rings and you and I both know it. They were to go to a Khan of character, bravery and strength. You are not that Khan."

The teenager's voice shakes ever so slightly. "I'm the only Khan."

"Let us theorize, Temugin. Let us say that your mother was pregnant after you. Let us theorize that I was the father; we both know she was no whore. Now, you were not even seven when your mother died. I had been married to her for ten months. Tell me, what is the most common cause of death among Mongolian women?"

Gene was white as a sheet. Zhang kept talking.

"China's one child policy did not allow for any more children from your mother. If she had died during childbirth – and remember, this is only in theory – there would be no choice but to hand over the child to the government. Unless, and this is where the theory becomes far fetched, someone were to take the child and something, I don't know what, convinced the doctor to claim there had been a stillbirth. Out in the brush wilderness of the mountains no one would ever be able to know the truth except one little boy who woke up as the full moon rose and saw the bloody hands of those involved in the child's birth. It would be a great tragedy, but he would be clueless, too young and foolish to piece together the puzzle that lay in front of him. What a sad little theory, eh, Khan Temugin?"

"Liar!" Gene screamed, lunging forward in his restraints. He was held back, but trashed against them anyway. "You son of a bitch! You killed my mother because she wouldn't give you and heir! I heard you arguing, you're lying, you're just trying to mess with my head-"

"And she did not give me an heir," Zhang returned calmly, pleased that Gene had kept using Mongolian even in his panic. He always did revert to his barbaric tongue when he was angry, and right now he was looking positively furious. "At least, she never gave me one willingly. I had to take her by force and I had to force out the baby. She would have done anything to keep it from me, you know. She always wanted you to be the heir. She never understood how weak you were – and are."

The boy had gone silent and still. _Take her boy force._ His eyes went wide in horror and he made a shuddery, gasping sound as he sank to his knees. The Maggia released him, letting him collapse on the floor in shock and disgust. His mother. His had been – and he hadn't stopped it, why hadn't he stopped it, he should have taken the ring she had and killed Zhang, he knew he was no good. His mind and emotions were racing a thousand different directions as tears began to slide down his cheeks. This was so surreal and repulsive, he begged God for this to be a nightmare, but when he opened his eyes he was still here and this was still happening. _Force out the baby._ They'd read about that in science class, how a rudimentary C-section performed with only a knife and a lot of determination could still yield a living baby but would kill the mother. That was why anyone who gave a damn about the mother had to rush her to a hospital immediately and not mess with the birthing process.

But Zhang didn't give a damn about anyone but himself. He'd let his wife die without any hesitation. The blood on his hands from years ago flashed before Gene's eyes. Gene's amber eyes were shaky and he looked at Zhang in utter amazement. "You. You are a _monster_."

Zhang grinned at him and rose to leave. "Your brother Tamir is worse."

Gene blacks out. His eyes go into an unseeing stare and he stops crying. There's a broken look to him, a sort of deadness that sends a thrill down Zhang's spine. He has done his job. Now he simply has to wait and try not to revel in it too much. Oh, but it was so good to see that smug little bastard child get knocked down a peg. He looks so devoid of life that Zhang wonders if maybe he'll try to kill himself. The thought's entertaining in its own right, but none of his concern. Gene Khan was a problem. That problem has been destroyed entirely. Now he needs to move on and leave the child to his own insanity.

Inside his own head, the Mongolian teen is lost. There is Temugin, small and screaming, a little boy who's lost his mother and doesn't understand why. He's broken hearted, weak, merely a child. There's Jianyu the beaten and abused boy who was the laughingstock of his school for being Mongolian in China, an easy ethnic target whose home life was an even worse nightmare. There is his biological father, with his golden sunlight eyes and voice soft as a whisper, laying on the streets with blood staining his police uniform as he told Temugin to look away. He sees his mother, with her skin lighter than a foreigner's, pale as the moonbeams that had given her the name Sarantuyaa. He sees the cool and laid back Gene laughing with Pepper over coffee and smiling warmly at her as she speaks. He envisions the Mandarin, the armor that is every Khan's birthright. And he sees all of these people, all these versions of himself, his parents, as if they are surrounding him in a circle. He sees them all and their problems through the eyes of one who knows all the fault is on him, and he begins to shake.

He sees all of their pain and he's so sorry. He never meant to hurt all of them. He's not sure who he is anymore, Gene, Jianyu or Temugin, but he knows that he failed. He didn't save their mother, his mother. Now there's a bastard child running around that's going to take on the Khan name and be at the beck and call of Zhang, that monster in human form. It's all gone so wrong. He doesn't know how he ended up here. He doesn't know how everything started spiraling out of control so quickly, doesn't know how he was so foolish he didn't see what had happened to his mother until it was too late. He can't comprehend why Zhang would do all this, destroy those who were supposed to be closest to him and derail destiny in the process. All he knows is that _he_, not Zhang or Tamir, is the true heir to the rings, and neither of them can be trusted anymore. He knows what he must do. He didn't stop this from happening, but he will end this madness with his own two hands if he has to.

All his life, he had to fight and claw his way to the top. Every day was a war, survival was all he could hope for. The pain and burn scars faded but remained engraved into his mind. He remembers the beatings. He remembers the burning and the snide, mocking laughter that came with it. He remembers the first time he began to snap, turning from weak little Temugin into Jianyu, whose range of emotion was stoic and furious, who didn't lay down and let the world beat him into submission. When he began to hatch his plans to overthrow Zhang, Temugin was scared and Jianyu was so consumed with cold anger and hate that he didn't care what happened to him anymore. When he began gathering rings it was Gene who made friends and Jianyu who considered everyone disposable. Whenever he had to kill someone to further his plans Temugin and Gene fell silent, unable to comprehend the horror their counterpart took in stride.

When Zhang tried to break him, everybody in his stepson's head came out and argued and reacted. They mourned, grieved, panicked, feared, and guilt washed over them, but one rose above them all. None of them was strong enough to deal with this save for Jianyu. Jianyu had been murderously and sadistically dealing with all of their problems ever since the first time Zhang beat him unconscious. Temugin certainly couldn't deal with reality. He hadn't seen the light of day in years. And Gene is too sentimental, soft hearted and appearance focused to take this on even on a good day – and today is not a good day. Today is the day the other two parts of who he is have to fade away. The sad little boy who sobbed because his mother was gone and the kind hearted teenager who snuggled with Pepper vanish. His vision clears. His mind is no longer cluttered or racing and he opens his eyes to find that he's not scared anymore. The voices fade, the images vanish, the memories do not haunt him. He eyes Zhang and knows that before this sun has set, the old man will be dead and those rings won't be on his hands anymore.

And Jianyu doesn't care who he has to kill or what he has to destroy to get it, but he _will_ have his revenge.


	28. Season One Finale Part Two

Author's Note: This chapter is two spliced together mini-chapters; they aren't long enough to be separate. They're also present tense – this is what's going through Tony's head as Fin Fang Foom tries to kill them and as Gene betrays them. This is Tony's epiphany of light in contrast to Gene's dark one. Although, as always, it's still all dark in the literary sense. :P

* * *

_Ordinary morality is for ordinary people._ – Mandy, from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy

_I understand now. If I don't want to see something, I just need to open my eyes. And I realize that everything in front of me is part of something important. Even if seeing it is... very painful._ – Tsukasa, .hack//sign

_A true friend stabs you in the front._ – Oscar Wilde

* * *

"It'll be okay."

Clay colored eyes meet storm ones shakily. There's terror written all over her face. She's wrapped around and into Gene as if trying to ground herself somehow. Atomic orange hair, now messy, clings to her face. She stares at him as if he's gone mad – and he has, he really has. He meets her gaze unflinchingly, not shaking, not wavering, just looking fondly at her. Pepper doesn't understand how he can say those words right now. She's never understood him or the way his mind works.

It's going to be okay. Sacrifice. He understands now, he does. He feels like he's on the threshold of something in this moment. He sees time through the lens of a scientific mind, sees the major events of his life laid out in front of him as if spread on a table. Ever since his mother's death there had been a dark passenger, a cold dead weight that had clung to him, trying to drag him down. For so long he'd thought it was a burden that was his and his alone. It isn't, he sees that so clearly and perfectly now. There is a weight upon everyone's lives, an old shame they fight to overcome for years if not forever. His father had one in the form of his old weapons. Pepper has one in the form of her family's internal collapse. Rhodey has one in the pressure of never being allowed to make an error.

There is no one individual dark passenger. It's not a curse only he has to live with. Everyone struggles like he does, everyone claws their way up to the top from the bottom just like he does. Some people might fall farther than others, but everyone's flawed. Everyone is waging a war just by being alive. There's a powerful light in Tony's eyes when he speaks to Pepper. He's in the middle of a revelation, he'll be back in a moment, he thinks calmly – everything has gone serene and collected in his mind. This isn't the right time. A giant stone dragon is attempting to murder them. Now is not the time to attain full Buddha. But he can't help it. His dark passenger is completely gone, having been silenced forever now that he understands.

He understands that the past cannot be undone. There is only the present and future. He destroyed one of the people closest to him out of anger and jealousy. He can save every random stranger in New York City and it won't matter because they're not close to him like his mother was. In order to eliminate his guilt, his shame, all the tormenting nightmarish memories, he has to save those closest to him. Iron Man can't save them because that doesn't count. Tony Stark has to be the one to save their lives so he'll finally be at peace. His salvation is in his hands, staring him in the face, and it's going to be okay.

It's okay. It's all going to end. He's going to make peace with his past forever. He looks at Pepper and Gene, who clutch each other close, not having attained the dissonant serenity he's basking in. Pepper's face is flushed as she fights back tears. Her eyes are wide and fearful as her unsteady fingers clutch Gene's arm. She is seconds away from breaking down completely. Gene is still and unreadable. His eyes are hidden by his glasses, but nothing can hide the tensing of his body, the cold sweat dripping off of him. His breathing is rigidly controlled, an odd contrast to Pepper's hyperventilating. They don't understand what's happening or how simple the test is or they wouldn't be like this. They think they're going to die. They don't realize he won't let that happen.

"It's going to be okay," he repeats to Pepper, calmly. The Irish girl looks at him as if she's in shock. "You're getting out of here."

He launches himself forward. He yells. The dragon chases after him. And Tony isn't scared at all. He isn't even nervous about dying, not now that he knows he's made up for everything. He's okay with dying now that he's been freed from his inner demons and he's fine with this being it. If his career as an inventor ends here, okay. He'll have gone down saving lives which means he won't regret it, not even a little. His eyes are like cut sapphire, clear and steady in the heat of chaos. The situation is so fantastic and bizarre he should be having a panic attack. Yet he's not, he's under the influence of some kind of emotional peace that nothing can pierce right now.

It's going to be okay. It's not a survival mantra or a madman's chant. It is his Truth, and he suddenly feels rejuvenated and electric, restored and powerful. Let the world go mad all around him. Tony Stark doesn't need to be Iron Man to be alright anymore. He needs no crutch, no extra personality, no thick armor plating. He can live his own life and die his own death without the split anymore. Tony is not scared, or even thinking anymore. He simply is moving, living. Sacrificing. He is free. His guilt is gone. He feels complete. He thinks he's done it, realized what all this love nonsense is about. This is his family and he is their protector. He grins a lunatic's grin for a fleeting moment as the dragon roars, feeling the sound's vibrations shake the very floor beneath him.

He's not just okay. He's _whole_ for the first time in eight years, and Armageddon couldn't touch him now.

* * *

They never found the body.

He'd seen his father on the ground – with a large wound in his back. Claw marks, like he'd been fighting with something. But that wasn't a fatal wound, just one that could knock the man unconscious. Tony's suit had been busily engulfing him and saving his life while his father passed out. In the haze of his own rapid blood loss and pain Tony had thought he was dead. He wasn't and somehow after Tony's suit had flown him away his father's body had vanished altogether in spite of how physically impossible such a thing was. It baffled the FBI and it disturbed Tony. Now it all made sense. There was no body because Gene had grabbed the unconscious Howard Stark and teleported off with him, leaving no evidence behind.

Gene's dark passenger is the one in control. There were maybe some moments, some brief days where he was, but the darkness inside him has overtaken everything. He sees it in the Chinese-Mongolian boy's eyes, the amber flecked tawny brown Pepper used to adore so much. Something's wrong with them. The light inside him has gone out. All of that wit, that camaraderie, the confidence that made Gene who he was, is gone. The dark, cold part of him that follows twisted and insane trails of logic and feels no remorse is all that is left. Good and snarky Gene is dead. The Mandarin is dead. There is only vengeance, power thirst and a sinister agenda left to rule over this body right now. There's no trace of humanity left in him.

_Those who fight monsters should take care they don't become monsters. And if you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you._ Who knew something taught in English class would hold so incredibly true in the real world? He'd laugh if he wasn't so furious right now. Not hateful, never again hateful. He does not hate Gene Khan. Gene is a broken and shattered version of Tony, Tony minus support and love. Gene is a pitiable failure, a large scale mistake, a loser. Tony doesn't hate him, doesn't want to kill him. All of that has faded now; the voice of hate and vengeance that used to threaten to overtake him has been silenced. All he wants is to protect those close to him, at all costs. He has found his call in life.

That is his purpose in life. He is Iron Man and he is Tony Stark. No longer is he juggling between them, he's both and neither is a pushover. He is a hero, a son, a friend, a brother and there is no force on this Earth powerful enough to stand in his way. His gaze locks into Gene's and sears into him with so much force the other boy shudders, seeing what he has unleashed. He hasn't broken Tony by telling him he's got his dad, he's unleashed a Pandora's Box of righteous fury and relentless determination. There is something blazing inside Tony that makes Gene's dark, twisted mind recoil. Tony is operating on pure selfless love and his calm in the midst of this chaos confuses his enemy.

He will not let this monster hurt his family anymore than he already has. He's already processed what's happening. His mind has somehow switched Gene over from the category of friend to monster, which would be an unreasonable judgment if Tony didn't know him so well. But Tony does, oh God he knows where Gene's coming from, where Gene's at. He's hurting, he's angry, he's desperate and he's haunted by something that Tony can't identify. He doesn't have to know details. He can see the brokenness written all over his former friend's face like a script. Betrayal, pain, abuse, vengeance. He's a pitiable monster, but he's still a monster nonetheless. A bad past is not a get out of responsibility free card. He could have chosen a different path than this, could have saved himself. Instead he let the weight of whatever happened to him crush him altogether. He's relinquished control of his life to his insanity.

He's a ticking time bomb. Bombs could only be disarmed one of two ways: slowly rewiring them or using brute force to snap them in half. They had almost defused Gene by sheer love and friendship. Almost. Unfortunately there is no such thing as an almost harmless bomb, there is only dangerous and dead. When Tony wakes up in his room, he looks into the eyes of his friends, broken hearted, shell shocked Pepper and solemn faced Rhodey with his quiet suffering. He does not tell them, but he makes his decision based purely upon their pain.

No one else will be hurt like this.

The next time he sees Gene Khan, he will kill him.


	29. Calling In The Calvary

_Cyn-ic: An idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two, and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision._ – Rick Bayan, writer

_The extremist is the man who calls in the big guns when things have only just started to go wrong. He sends in the last resort as his first impulse, treats every minor battle as a full scale war, and he always fights dirty. He's the hero you'd really rather not be saved by.__ – _Riley Husseff, author

* * *

Rhodey's brother was surprisingly handy in times of crisis.

He had gotten Tony's heart recharger out of the rubble of the now destroyed armory. He had then proceeded to try (failingly) to call each of them and, when it hadn't worked, had the sense to move all of Tony's surviving research and inventions (of which there were very few) to the apartment of a friend of his across town. Having thus salvaged what little was left he had proceeded to call up Pepper's father and tell him what he knew of the situation before taking a deep breath and calling his mother. When there was no answer he had taken a deep breath, called her business-only cell phone and tried not to panic.

In the Rhodes household it was understood that you did not call Roberta while she was in court. So when her eldest son left twelve messages explaining the situation, this translated as 'dire emergency; prepare to panic' even before she'd heard any of the messages. Knowing his mother was on her way home he had then spent ten minutes tending to a broken and battered Tony Stark while his little brother gave him a very shell-shocked cliff notes rundown of the whole situation. Pepper had stood by, looking like she was drifting in and out of reality until Seth had pulled her aside and given her something hot to drink and a place to sit. His little brother looked no better; he was about to work himself into hysterics at this rate and Seth couldn't honestly blame him. But now was really not the time to have a breakdown. Mentally gathering up all the skills and strength he'd learned in Wakanda, he shifted into commander mode.

"Everybody calm down and shut the fuck up," Seth had stated loudly, firmly. "Now is not the time to freak out. We can do that when Stark's stabilized. James, get the heart recharger, it's on the table. Red, go get water, Tony's dehydrated." He barely acknowledged their presence, focusing on the unconscious superhero in front of him. "Must've been one helleva fight. He really had the crap beat out of him; boy's gonna need a lot of rest." He turned to Pepper and smiled encouragingly at the redhead. "He'll be fine, though, jus' give him time."

And that was when the redheaded girl had fallen apart, sobbing hysterically and collapsing into Seth's startled arms. Over Rhodey's protests that she should pull herself together, Seth gave his brother a glare and wrapped his muscular arms around her. She was far shorter than him, but the words she whimpered and sobbed into his chest made the gravity of the situation strike home. Gene had been their friend and he had tried to kill them all and now he had the power to kill everybody and he wasn't supposed to be like this he was never like this before and – her hysteria blended paragraphs worth of words together into one long sentence. Murmuring soothing words to her, half in English and half not, he rubbed her back as Rhodey turned away, too proud to let his older brother see the tears in his own eyes. Fine, let him be that way. _Whatever helps you get through life,_ Seth thought with an internal sigh as the teenage girl began to shake. _In a crisis, there's no such thing as a wrong choice._ While he wished the redhead would calm down, he knew Tony was stabilized, so now was indeed the time for panic and tears.

When Pepper had finally calmed down, or perhaps just run out of tears to shed, Seth had gotten the truth out of the two of them. The emotional truth from Pepper, the cold logical truth from James. Both of them seemed to still be in shock; James was furious and couldn't believe he'd fallen for Gene's act while Pepper was going into denial. Poor Red. She looked so tired and downtrodden. Going into caretaker mode, Seth made them something to eat and called Pepper's dad to tell him that his daughter was safe. He lied and told the man that she hadn't been anywhere near the building that now lay in ruins; he covered for her out of equal parts pity and dislike for the FBI. Seth did put forth some truth, that Tony was hurt and Pepper didn't want to leave his side, and he hung up after having promised Roberta would call him and give him a full update once she was home. Why parents always insisted on talking to other parents, he neither knew nor cared at the moment. He had bigger priorities, like the shaky and empty-eyed girl who was currently making him feel uneasy. That look wasn't healthy, but he was stumped on what to say to snap her out of it after what had happened.

"You okay, Red?" he asked as she and Rhodey hovered nervously over Tony. "If you wanna go home I can drive you. You know that James won't let anything happen to Tony; who'd he have to mother hen without him?"

Rhodey shot his older brother a glare, but Pepper managed a weak smile. "No, I'm okay. I should be here for Tony when he wakes up." She shifted from foot to foot uneasily. "Um, thanks for putting up with me freaking out like that. It's… it's been a long day, Seth."

"It's cool, Red. You two just let me know when Tony wakes up so I can check how he's feeling. I'm no doctor but I know how to take vitals and check for a concussion. It's better than nothing." Seth turned to leave and then paused in the doorway. "I didn't tell your dad what happened – Imma leave that up to you, 'kay?"

Pepper smiled gratefully at him, and Seth wondered if she was as okay as she looked. If ever there was a time to fall apart… Shit, he needed a cigarette. He hadn't smoked in months, but on days like today he wished he'd never quit. He idly dialed his mother's personal cell and frowned at the lack of response. He needed her here to talk to James. The good son had never been very easy for Seth to understand or to read, especially not in the midst of a crisis. His little brother was from a different world, the lap of luxury, a good neighborhood with white friends and a completely different mindset. They didn't have much in common past a desire to do right, the same parents and a radical temper. The difference between their temperaments, though, was that Seth had learned to control his anger and use it where James let it loose in rants and flashes. They had been very distant from each other for a very long time. They loved each other, but they were from such radically different mindsets that it was hard to converse without a lot of awkwardness.

They were kind of closer now, since he returned from Wakanda. He liked to think they understood each other better, to a degree. But they couldn't comfort each other. All Seth could do was try to help as best he could and wait for James to come to him, because he didn't know how to approach his brother anymore. They'd been too far apart for too long to just talk. And Red, poor Red. The poor girl was having a breakdown and he had no idea what to say to her; women weren't his area of expertise. He'd spent his life dealing with radical militants, political extremists, mercenaries and soldiers. Few of them were women and those who were weren't teenagers. And how the hell had all this complicated madness gone down under his nose? Could it get any worse – and that was the phone ringing. Dammit, he should've known thinking that would've tempted fate. Wincing, he picked up the phone and froze as he saw the caller ID. Stark International. Oh, crap.

"Hello, this is the Rhodes household," Seth said automatically, mentally cussing up a storm. "Who's this?"

"Sasha Nein," came the curt reply. "Head of Stark International. I need to speak to Tony Stark. _Now_."

"He's not available," Seth shifted uneasily.

"Then _make_ him available. This is important." The German man's voice held a definite sense of urgency. In the background Seth could hear voices and commotion, and heard Stark International's new head order someone to do something involving satellites before he spoke to Seth again. "I don't care what he has going on right now, I don't have time to argue. I need him on the phone this second."

"Why's that?" Seth felt defensive of the injured boy, laying in the other room with his heart recharger pumping desperately to keep him alive. "Can't this wait until-"

"We may have found his father."

There was a dead silence, then Seth dared to breathe out, "What?" in sheer disbelief before regaining his tongue. "But-"

"I'm sorry, I can't discuss this with you. There's been moles caught in the company and I can no longer tell who is to be trusted. Simply tell Tony that I need to see him as soon as is possible. I can't come to him – security is of the utmost importance – so he'll have to come here. Any time is fine," Sasha rushed on, ordering someone to trace that signal and telling someone else to find someone in the company who spoke Esperanto. He kept going at such a pace that Seth almost couldn't keep up with him. "But time is most definitely of the essence. He literally cannot get here fast enough. Things are complicated and getting worse as time progresses. We need his help; the Starks are a breed of genius far above anyone else here."

"He – Tony's injured right now, he can't…" Seth was still trying to process everything that was coming at him. "How did you even get this number? How did you…?"

"_The second_ he's able to come here, get him on this. And tell Berti to call me – I tried both her phones but I couldn't reach her-"

Now it was Seth's turn to interrupt. "Berti? You mean my mom?"

"Er, yes, Mrs. Rhodes. Mrs. Rhodes is what I meant to say." Sasha abruptly (perhaps too conveniently) had to go. "Just pass it on. Goodbye."

Seth was left staring at the phone in his hands like it was a foreign object. Well, holy crap. If Seth were a drinking man now would be the time for a beer. As it was, he winced when he heard Rhodey and Pepper's voices. They were arguing. He should go stop that about now, yet he found himself rooted to the spot. There was no way Stark International's new head would lie about something like this, which meant it was the truth. That raised a bunch of questions. Namely, why hadn't the FBI or SHIELD been able to locate him before now? What kind of power did Sasha Nein have that – wait. Sasha Nein, as in, ex-Psychonaut, still powerful psychic? All of the profiles of those in the Psychonauts were heavily guarded given they were stronger than SHIELD and richer than God, but he remembered that name from somewhere, somewhere significant. He'd have to have some of his connections look into it.

This morning his biggest priority had been getting a part time job. Now Iron Man was laying comatose twenty feet away, a former psychic secret agent was on the phone, the world's security was in danger due to the Mandarin and Tony's dad was alive. Oh, and there were traitors inside Stark International. Fantastic. Seth took a deep breath, his russet eyes narrowing. He was starting to slip back into the mentality of a warrior, that old mindset that guarded him from the insanity of it all. He needed to inform Rhodey and Pepper of all of this. Even if they had kept things from him, he wasn't bitter. It had been the wiser choice at the time, given that he'd been a stranger to Rhodey for so long, but this situation was different. He stared thoughtfully at the phone. Secrets were what had caused this pile up of problems, and it struck him that in a world without lies this wouldn't be happening. Unfortunately they lived in a world where everyone was false and no one could be trusted, where lies and deception were so thick as to almost be tangible.

Howard Stark was none of Seth's business. This wasn't his problem. It wasn't fair that he should always get dragged into everyone else's struggles. By the same token it was impossible for him not to take this into his own hands, knowing that the world was at stake and his family's welfare was at risk. Life was never fair. Life was a desperate struggle not to die, a fight to stay alive on a planet where everything was trying to kill you. Your only hope was to make allies and have them back you up when it all went wrong. He wasn't close enough to Rhodey to be called family, but he was an ally of Iron Man by virtue of the fact that Iron Man was fighting against a greater evil. Seth covertly glanced around, as if checking to make sure no one was there, then he dialed the phone. Putting one hand around the receiver to muffle the sound, he dropped his voice to a low whisper.

"Ghost, man, remember that favor you owe me? You ever hear of a guy called 'The Mandarin'? Good. I got a job for you."


	30. Jade Tinted Glasses

_You died all alone, and I no longer pray, for if there were a God He'd have let you stay. So tomorrow I'll burn our house to the ground, and I'll join you up there, I no longer care._ - Irish ballad by K's Choice

_I say victory is better than honor._ - Craven Knight, from Magic: The Gathering

* * *

Seth remembers what it was like to be young. To have faith in someone, to trust someone with his secrets, his real feelings, his heart. He remembers wearing his heart on his sleeve as he fought with his mother and the world, remembers crying as he stole technology from Stark International that was dangerous but necessary to keep Wakanda safe. Those days of passions and hopes haunt him. He was so young and so ready to change the world. He held his head high and fought for the common man, for the safety of the only African nation not ripped apart by the bloody wars white men, drug lords and militants waged down there. He had spent many a night huddled in a room with other people planning out attacks and disabling weapons, working out counter strategies to counter strategies and feeling as if he was going to make a difference.

But he remembers Africa outside of Wakanda. He remembers the backstabbers and psychotic militants who tried to use him, tried to kill him, and successfully tortured him. He remembers the bodies strewn out across the land, ordinary and commonplace to even the youngest of children. He remembers the people starving at the doors of warehouses full of food that corrupt government officials wouldn't release to them. Late at night he sees his best friend's mangled corpse, the victim of yet another act of violence meant to beat the weak into further submission and kill all the rebels. Ayo Sabisi died in Seth's arms, bloody and broken, having been beaten in front of a village of people just to make sure nobody got any ideas about taking down the local warlord and drug dealer, Gacheru Ktar. Seth can still remember Ayo's hand gripping Seth's hair before his grip went weak and the light in his eyes vanished, that final breath sounding like a sigh more than anything else, and he remembers something inside him died that day. He couldn't move, sitting there holding his fallen comrade close, in too much pain to cry as his heart shattered inside him.

He killed Gacheru. Not by sitting behind a table and planning or huddling on a battlefield directing elite soldiers to do it. _He_ did it, with a knife and pure fury. He doesn't feel any better for it. He feels empty and forsaken. He hates the world. He wants to know why. Ayo was a good man, the best Seth's ever known, and he was struck down for daring to try to fight evil. Every night Seth sees the younger man's face as he tried to say something in his last seconds. His eyes were bluer than the sky, his dark chocolate skin covered in scraped and bruises, and he managed a soft, "sorry" before he finally slipped away. It was so like him, Seth thinks as he gets drunk in the darkness of his room, staring at the walls. It was so like Ayo to apologize for everything and always try to smile through the pain. Even being tortured couldn't taint Ayo Sabisi's good heart. Seth remembers more than he wants to, more often than he wants to. He sees Ayo in Rhodey, sees the love and compassion that he fell in love with, and it hurts. It's like a knife is in his chest and it gets twisted every time he sees his younger brother. Thankfully Rhodey's more angry, unforgiving, and utterly white than Ayo ever was. These small differences are the only reason Seth can stand to be in the room with him anymore.

Seth trusts no one. Seth has faith in no one. He's seen the darker side of humanity too many times, seen the evils of the world up close in gritty detail. He sees how the people around him don't care about one another, only looking out for themselves. Everyone has a price. Everyone's standards and morals have limits, and when pushed they will abandon them in pursuit of revenge, money and fame. He has to look out for his family and himself because no one else will. No one else would care if they died. The world is a cold place and every waking moment was a battle he had to win. Once he believed in higher ideals and the goodness of humanity, but once Ayo died everything good in Seth died with him. Seth knows the truth of the world now, that he has to protect those closest to him with everything he has, every resource and every contact, because otherwise he'll lose them. He can't take that. Whatever's left of his willpower, his heart, his mind - everything pushes him forward on this path. He has to be the protector now. His father is overseas protecting the weak and needy of other nations and leaving his family vulnerable in his wake.

So Seth will go through Hell to kill Gene Khan, because he will not lose Ayo twice.

Rhodey does not see reason, can't comprehend why his brother would 'stoop to such lows'. It's one of those phrases he's thrown at Seth in the past hour like bullets, but thy bounce off the older man like pebbles. He remembers what it was like to think that nobody had to die to make things right, to believe life was sacred and people were precious even if they were criminals. He understands the torrents of rage directed at him from both his mother and his brother. Seth understands them, but they don't understand him, don't _know_ him anymore. They don't know that Ayo ever existed, that he once carried Seth on his back for five miles over rocky terrain when Seth had been shot. They don't know about those glorious days after Wakanda was secured and made safe, those days spent sprawled out on the grass together in the shade. And they need to know about Ayo Sabisi in order to understand why Seth walks around with a heart made out of stone. He needs to tell them why he's falling apart. They deserve to know why he's acting like an emotionally distant asshole, why he cries whenever he hears Gracious Mama Africa come on the radio. That song rips at his heart because it was Ayo's anthem; he knew all the lyrics by heart.

Why can't Seth just tell them? Why do the words die in his throat? He thinks it might be because the pain is so fresh, because the wound is so deep. He remembers it all too clearly. Time hasn't had a chance to heal this. Every second he was in Africa replays in his head. It's why he doesn't fight with his family anymore; he just tells them it's what he has to do and then asks his mother if she wants him to leave. She tells him no and he sees in her eyes that she's worried. She sees what he's become. She wants to know why. Roberta and Seth stare at each other for so long that the silence is palpable before she finally breaks down and pulls him close, tears in her eyes as he whispers he's just trying to keep them safe. "I know, baby, I know," she whispers back, and Rhodey just stands there, confused, caught in an emotional whirlwind brought on by a life where the right choice isn't clear anymore. Tony has remained silent this entire time. Seth has heard the two younger boys talking. Tony is all too aware of how close he came to losing his best friend.

The parallel between their situations twists that knife of grief deeper into Seth. He wants to go curl up in his room and get so drunk he doesn't know his own name let alone Ayo's. But he's got preparations to make, favors to call in, contacts to talk to if he's going to track down the Mandarin. He's got a brother to argue with, an argument that ends when Seth asks him what it felt like all those times to almost lose Tony, to see him dying and helpless. His mind hands him a vision of Ayo's bloodied body and his hands clench into fists. Rhodey senses something beneath the surface, but he understands. Tony understands in a way that Rhodey cannot. He's seen his own father broken and injured, left alone to die, and it haunts him. He knows what it's like to have someone to protect, someone to love, and to lose that person. The difference is that Tony's getting a chance to get his father back. Ayo is gone and never coming back. Seth tries to keep himself busy so he won't break down. He's not sure what he'll do if he ever does break and cry, really cry and mourn his friend, he just knows that the only reason he didn't kill himself in Africa was by not thinking about this whole mess. He can't. He has work to do.

Sometimes Seth sees himself in Rhodey's eyes, sees the temper, the protector, the warrior in him. And that scares him. Warriors get wounded. Killed. He remembers Africa and he can't let that happen to his brother. He doesn't want Rhodey to become hollow and empty inside like Seth has. He doesn't want Rhodey to be killed or have to kill someone or lose someone. Seth remembers murder. In Africa the act didn't carry the stigma it might have in the United States. He was a hero to people. He didn't want it. He remembers the way the corrupt mass murderer screamed and begged. He remembers thinking about main arteries and making it fast. Seth was not a monster out for painful vengeance, just a heart broken man trying to stop evil from spreading, and the way he killed him reflected that. Still the action hangs over him like a black cloud. Necessary as it was it was the sickest, most disgusting thing he'd ever done and Rhodey cannot be allowed to see death up close like that. War Machine and Iron Man are just children under the armor. They deserve a life free of pain and suffering, which means someone else is going to have to step up and protect them. He'll do it. He has no choice. He'll go insane otherwise because any more loss _will_ be too much to bear, and if he loses one more precious person he'll shoot himself through the head just to make the hurt and pain go away.

Rhodey offers to take Seth to church. Seth never had much faith in God. He didn't actively disbelieve in God or religion, he just was too busy crusading for causes, going to rallies, arguing with people, writing up his intellectual stance on whatever was the hot button issue of the day, and keeping himself busy. He'd lived his life with a passion for helping to free and fight for the people of Africa. It took a lot of time and energy to participate in the protests, raids, and pseudo-military things he had. God was the kind of thing meant to comfort people. He had never needed comfort before he met Ayo. He'd been too passionately in love with his cause, too angry at the world and at America to need comfort or other human beings. Then he'd found someone who understood, really understood, who loved the world and all its people in a way that left Seth in awe. And all he had needed was one true friend, one person who was truly upright and moral. For so long he had relied on his best friend to be his backup. He couldn't imagine life without someone like Ayo to reel in his extremist tendencies and help him connect to people. Without him he was lost. He needs comfort. Maybe he needs religion. But he can't imagine talking to anyone about his problems, least of a church full of people, and Rhodey knows better after what happened last time than to push it. Still, it's good that Rhodey has God. It means he still believes in something, still has principles, still is truly alive. James Rhodes wears his heart on his sleeve.

Seth Rhodes isn't sure he even has one anymore.


	31. An Alliance Is Born

Author's Note: I couldn't think of how to end this chapter, but I wanted something to go right for once. And now we move into my personal season two, with new good guys and new faces. Yay, I guess.

* * *

_He who becomes your ally at your peak is not to be trusted, but he who allies himself with you at your lowest and most humble is a man you may entrust your life to._ - Joseph Greenwall, author and painter

_The cavalry is here. They're here to save our lives, pull together the broken hearts and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. All well and good, I have to say, but I must ask - why couldn't the cavalry have come earlier? I'm not ungrateful, I just think it would've been nice if they'd kept us from needing to be saved in the first damn place._ - Anwara, from the Yon Dragons book series

* * *

Tony Stark immediately decided he liked Sasha Nein.

The new Head of Stark International had a PDA in one hand and a cellphone in the other, and was firing off directions to people in several languages both on the phone and aloud. People parted like water to let him through as his aqua eyes darted from person to person. His bowlcut black hair was slightly messy, as if he'd gone a day or two without sleeping, and he was thin as a rake. But no one could doubt what a commanding person he was; he'd been in SHIELD, the FBI, and the Psychonauts and had held positions of power in all three. His voice carried a German accent left over from his homeland, but his English was flawless and he held himself with an air of confidence that sent people scrambling, not out of fear like under Obadiah's reign, but out of the feeling this was a man they should follow. He wasn't intimidating like his predecessor; instead, he was unnerving. There was something in the psychic's eyes that made people feel like they were being seen through, and it was distinctly nerve wracking to have to report to him. His business-like demeanor and stoic expression only added to the severity of the situation as he led Tony away from the frantic offices and up to his own private room where they could talk securely.

Sasha smelled like cigarettes and, the second they entered the office, Tony was keenly aware of the half empty vodka bottle on Sasha's desk. The German man put it away with a sigh, looking very unconcerned with the alcohol and very lost in thought. There were blackout shades covering the windows now for security's sake, and all Obadiah's things had been cleared out, but the man hadn't had time to move in properly yet. Between the police investigation into the Stane family deaths and finding Howard Stark, Nein was doing good to get a few hours of sleep in during the day. His eyes were tired, although they held that inescapable glow that psychics had. Tony had never met a psychic before, not a real one that could set him on fire with his mind or throw him across the room like a ragdoll. Most people, upon meeting someone like Sasha, immediately began trying to hide their thoughts. At this point, however, Tony was too tired to try and he doubted someone his father trusted enough to be his third in command would try to pick his brain for stray thoughts at a time like this. Strangely enough, after what happened with Stane Tony still managed to trust a few people at Stark International. Few was the key word - there were about twelve people left he'd really go to in a time of crisis. There had once been a whole company full of them, but then Stane came along, and the rest was history.

The dark haired man sighed, looking Tony over with a cross between sympathy and exhaustion. "Well, Anthony, I don't know how to say this gently, so I'll just say it. Your father is indeed alive. His vital signs are weak, but we do have a lock on the signal from the tracking device he implanted in himself. There's just one problem-"

"You can't track it." Tony sounded unsurprised. "There were five employees capable of reading the tracking data, but Stane fired all of them for being peace mongers instead of his yes men, right?"

Sasha smiled slightly at the phrase peace monger. "That's about the size of it. What I can't comprehend is how or why all five met untimely and horrific deaths in the week following their firing. The FBI couldn't find anything suggesting Stane ordered them killed off, but the loyalty of virtually everyone in the building has been called into question at this point. I've had to shut down whole units of the company due to bugs, traitors, sell outs and people robbing the company. So rather than alert anyone outside the circle of your father's most trusted men to the fact that he's alive, I simply called you."

"Smart," Tony said with a nod. "Nobody can sell that information if they don't have it. How many people know?"

"Four. Hei-Kyung Rhee, Altan Soleil, Roberta, and Seth. I trust Roberta to keep Seth from sharing this information even accidentally. That woman is scary-smart. Hei-Kyung and Altan were your father's right hand men - well, woman, in Hei-Kyung's case. Some other people in the company might have noticed me giving strange orders, but they won't question my reasoning - with so many switches in authority in the past six months they don't dare get on the bad side of their new boss. Job security's a good motivator for us adults; almost as good of one as coffee."

Tony breathed in a sigh of relief. Okay, the only people who knew were people who could definitely be trusted. Hei-Kyung had the iron will and sharp tongue Tony thought of when he pictured an action hero and Altan was the most morally upright man Tony knew, even if he _was _an utte asshole most of the time. Sasha was... unfamiliar, admittedly, but if his actions were any indicator of his character he was at least _trying_ to do the right thing. And Rhodey's mom was friends with the guy. Tony trusted her judge of character. Still, fresh off being wounded by Gene's betrayal, he couldn't help feeling on edge. There was nothing blatantly wrong with Stark International's current head, and having had that first impression from Gene Tony couldn't help but call his own ability to judge people into question. Thoughtfully, he leaned back in his chair for a moment, looking the man in front of him over with an air of suspicion. Sasha's blue-green eyes stared back unflinchingly. _Why am I being so paranoid?_ Tony asked himself internally. _Am I going to spend my whole life being afraid of being stabbed in the back?_

"Sasha, I'm going to ask you something." The brunette leaned forward over the man's desk, resting his arms on it. "Answer honestly. I think I know who took my dad. And I know I can't possibly get to him without help. But I don't trust SHIELD or their methods, and the person who has my dad is very powerful, and very violent. I need your help, but..."

The psychic tilted his head, looking thoughtful. "You don't trust me," he said slowly, as if he were reading something in Tony's eyes or from his expression. "You can't find any reason not to, but you can't find any reason _to_ trust me. That's a very wise train of thought, Tony. Still, if I were going to turn on you, I wouldn't have called you in the first place. If I didn't want Howard back just like you do, do you think I'd be so careful to keep this information in the hands of trustworthy people? I understand that there's a lot more to your life than I'm able to see or read; there's a lot going on in your life emotionally and physically right now. I know I can't possibly ask you to entrust me with any of that right now, when everything seems to be shifting so quickly, but Anthony? Your father wasn't just my boss." Sasha looked away, and his expression darkened. "I don't know who took him. If I could pry that information out of your brain I would have a SWAT team at his location as we speak. You don't seem to realize this, but your father was like family to a lot of people here at Stark International. He was everyone's mentor, best friend, confidant. I can't even begin to imagine where I would be without him. I knew him in high school and even then he had a level of compassion and leadership that was unmatched. I _have_ to find him, Tony. If you won't do this for me, then do it for him - he doesn't have time to wait around while you figure out who you can give information to. That place he's being held..."

It struck Tony that Sasha Nein was psychic. And while Psychonauts tended to be semi-super powered, there was one ability all psychics had, clairvoyance. Sasha couldn't tell where Howard Stark was, but he'd known he was alive for a while now, possibly ever since the accident. A strong clairvoyant would've been bombarded with phantom pain, visions of the person in question, and their terrified thoughts. Tony could picture it in his mind, the older man sitting down desperately trying to find Howard with his mind because it made no sense that they never found the body, and then like lightning striking it would all flood at him. Whatever was happening that was making Howard's vital signs weak, Sasha had been seeing and feeling it ever since the first day. The brunette shuddered in horror, and then his eyes went wide.

"Stane knew my father was alive and he didn't let you find him!" Tony half-shouted, fists clenching tightly. "That ruthless, heartless, son of a-"

"Anthony, in the man's defense your father's tracer wasn't operational at that time. It would've been my word against his had I tried to call in SHIELD or the Psychonauts, and the FBI had concluded Stane was innocent, so," here, Sasha sighed, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and pointer finger. "I tried. But Stane was too busy with his own love life and finding out you were Iron Man to do anything else."

Tony froze.

The Geman man gave him a glare. "No, I didn't read your mind. Good God, I'm so sick of people constantly thinking I'm pilfering through their mind all the time. I swear, you and Stane think your minds are the Holy Grail of reading - but I digress. Back on point, I've known you were Iron Man for a while now because Altan Soleil was both your father's best friend and a private detective for a lot of years. He pieced it together and we worked to keep Stane off your trail as best we could. Unfortunately, this meant never contacting you, as that risked giving away what we knew. So while I could call in a lot of favors and get the Psychonauts not to tell the government who you were, and Altan could keep setting Stane back in his attempts to recreate the armor, we never managed to think of a way to tell you that you had our support. Maybe if we had, things wouldn't be the clusterfuck they are right now. I can't say for sure. All I can do is tell you that now is not the time for what if's. Now is the time to get your father back and sort things out. I can't make you trust me, I can only tell you I'm on your side, and we're running out of time to save your father."

Tony stared at him. His mind was racing. There were so many things happening so fast. His life had been like this ever since Gene kidnapped his father, a whirlwind of changes and problems, and now this. Now finally something good was happening and he was afraid to trust in it because nothing good ever happened to him. On the one hand this had to be a trick; his life never got better in leaps and bounds like this. On the other hand, this was Sasha, one of his father's inner circle and best friends. This was someone who had a wealth of resources, chances and opportunities to take Tony down and profit off of it who hadn't simply because of loyalty to Howard Stark. Here was a man that could've made a pretty penny off of never finding Howard who had rushed to tell Tony about him and retrieve him as soon as was physically possible. For the first time someone was offering to help him, _really_ help him, with all his connections and power and utter sincerity. There were no strings attached, no way that Sasha would benefit from stabbing Tony in the back, and he'd had a dozen times he could've done so if he'd wanted to. It stunned Tony to realize it, but between Sasha and Seth he actually had a chance to stop the Mandarin.

Stop the Mandarin - what did that entail? Tony knew that, in the event Gene survived Ghost's attack, whether or not the boy would die was in his hands. This was Tony's decision now. If he decided to have everybody shoot to kill and aim to destroy they'd do it. If he ordered Gene to be taken in alive then everyone would agree to play by those rules. His resolve on the issue was shaky at best. Gene was a murderer and a con man with a sharp divide in his personality that had fooled everyone. He would only hurt and kill more people if he wasn't stopped soon. There was really only one way to fight someone as powerful as he was. This was an all or nothing situation right now. He either trusted Sasha completely, told him everything, and aimed for Gene's death or he could be secretive and keep trying to subdue Gene with Rhodey and Pepper as his back up. He didn't need to be a genius to see that the latter option was now impossible. Playing nice and going it alone were impossible now.

"Sasha, I trust you. Now sit down and brace yourself; my life is worse than a soap opera and ten times as complicated."

And with that, Tony began to tell the story of his life as it was after the crash, ancient Chinese technology, armored adventures and all.


	32. Scratching The Surface

_It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.__ – _Sherlock Holmes

_I could see their woe and sadness, and I pledged to ease their pain; their suffering would not be in vain._ – Mark Twain

* * *

Two weeks. They had two weeks of time before Sasha Nein could pull together sufficient forces to go after the Mandarin and rescue Tony's dad simultaneously.

The theory was that if they did both at the same time then the Mandarin wouldn't be able to interfere in Howard Stark's rescue, his hands full with the operatives the former Psychonauts agent was launching at him. Psychics had their own world of spies and soldiers, one that normal people like Tony weren't privy to, but Howard was very much their friend. He had refused to build any devices meant to harm psychics, even though that refusal was an unpopular choice in a time where psychics ended up on the enemy's side as often as his. But to kill everyone of a certain genetic type in a given area was just evil in Howard's eyes, period. Thus he ended up being one of few normal people ever to be part of the Psychonauts, helping them in their quest to understand the human psyche and repair shattered minds. Even if Sasha hadn't had any pull in the psychic community, all he had to do was say it was for Howard and there were plenty of people who would get in line to die for the man, ever since Howard created an incubator that greatly reduced the once sky high rate of SIDS among psychics. He saved their children, he refused to hurt them, and he had a mind open as a book around them as if he didn't care or fear having his mind read. The man was practically one of them in their eyes.

All it would take was a matter of days to pull together two teams well trained and willing to fight on his behalf. There were Psychonauts agents that left mid mission for this and Headquarters could kiss their ass for all they cared. Right now there were agents in thirteen countries volunteering. Tony never ceased being amazed at the way people loved his dad. The depths of his father's compassion had earned him an almost cultish following of people, and it brought tears to his eyes when he remembered all the wonderful memories of his father. Soon, very soon, it was all going to end, for better or for worse. If everything went well it would be fifteen days until he saw his father again. Suddenly every second dragged on at great length in that way that it always did once something good was up ahead. He was equal parts anxious and eager for the ensuing battle. He wanted his father back so badly it hurt. Life without him had been a nonstop rollercoaster of insanity, emotions, alcohol and pain. Howard was the pillar of strength that held his world together for so long that without him it had taken only days for him to give into his urge to drink.

He knew he was a disappointment to his father on that front. He didn't know how his father had ever managed to forgive him for what he'd done. He wasn't sure if he could ever make up for being such a monster. All he knew was that he'd finally, with time and Rhodey's support, managed to make some kind of progress with his emotions. He had come to some kind of acceptance of the whole thing, after so long never even daring to mention it to even his best friend. His therapist, God bless her soul, had helped him figure out how to read body language so he had some kind of understanding about the people around him. It was hard, but slowly he was learning to understand basic human emotions, and more than that, to feel them instead of faking his way through his entire life. He was eons away from the depressed soul with the weight of the world on his shoulders that he'd once been. In a large part he owed that to other people, not himself, and his sudden realizations in the last temple had made his views on a lot of things change in unexpected ways. Namely, being Tony Stark no longer required that he be perfect. He was a human. Humans made mistakes. That was just part of life.

A lot of the pressure, he saw, had all been in his own head. All these standards he held himself to were standards only he was aiming for. He was the one pushing himself so hard. He was the one who was trying to be flawless, trying to uphold the family name, trying to be a hero. But if he wasn't perfect, if he wasn't his father, even if he wasn't Iron Man, everyone around him still loved him. Everything had been in his head, it really had, from the moment his mother died and he swore never to mess up again. In the end he'd been pushing past his limits and it was a miracle he wasn't dead the way he acted, both as Iron Man and as Tony Stark. He'd been striving towards goals that no one else was holding himself to. It was a way of punishing himself, of hurting himself and dragging himself down because he'd wanted to be punished. He wanted to be hated, held to high standards, hurt, yelled at. He'd wanted that because, truth be told, deep down he'd been so angry at himself it burned like a white hot sun. He'd hated himself. That hate had manifested in all the wrong ways, in high standards and a workaholic mentality. The anger, regret, grief and guilt had overtaken all rationality and logic.

If he hadn't had Rhodey and Pepper he would be dead. He didn't doubt this for a second. If Mrs. Rhodes hadn't been there to talk to him and his father's will hadn't insisted he go to school, Tony's own mind would've driven him mad. Every second spent alone was a second where his thoughts had turned on him. Only those moments hanging out with normal people and laughing over little things had kept him from drowning in his own personal demons. Had he been alone he wouldn't have made it. Without the people around him calling him out on his behavior, taking care of him when he stumbled and getting him help when he drank, Tony had no doubt that he wouldn't have made it. These people were his family. This wasn't a blood family, granted, but it was a tight knit circle of people who would kill for each other if they had to. This was what Howard meant when he'd told his son love was the most important thing in the world. Like any teenage boy, he'd scoffed and disregarded the concept out of hand. Now he saw what Howard meant, saw how Rhodey's willingness to spend a day with Pepper was keeping her head above water as they got deeper and deeper into this conflict. He saw how she perked up when he offered to writer her Science paper for her. This was what a family did. A family supported each other through the heart of the chaos.

So, he thought to himself, now what? He was going to go mad slowly waiting for two weeks to pass. Every day thus far had been agony, every hour spent distractedly staring at the clock waiting for time to move forward. He wasn't capable of sitting around forever. Tony knew from his therapist that it wasn't the times of crisis that would push him back towards the alcohol, it was the unbearable moments where he was stuck worrying about the future. He also knew that he had ample access to alcohol if he needed it. Employing his genius to get ahold of it would've been exceedingly easy. Instead, to fight back the urge to go vodka hunting, he decided to break into Gene's locker and see what he could dig up. Know thy enemy was a phrase as old as the English language itself and one Tony considered to be very sound advice. Besides, he was hoping that there was some kind of piece to the puzzle he wasn't aware of.

He didn't want to have to kill Gene. He didn't want to accept that the other boy had played them like violins. He wanted there to be something else, some cause he wasn't aware of. For Pepper's sake if no one else's, there needed to be a reason behind the backstabbing. Gene's locker yielded a lot of forgotten crap since the boy had vanished abruptly. There was a lot of Mandarin Chinese pop music on various CD's left in his backpack alongside a very battered CD player. There were textbooks, a bottle of vodka mixed with orange juice (Tony pocketed it against his own will), and then Tony found it. At first it appeared to be completely innocent, nothing to glance at more than once, then he looked closer at the picture. There was a man with Gene's golden eyes and long black hair, which was tied back by a beaded hair holder. His clothes were that of a Chinese police officer, yet he wore bracelets that were wooden and painted in a way that Tony had never seen before. The woman next to him had pale skin and eyes that were dark and piercing, with black hair elaborately done up. Her outfit was what struck Tony as odd; the fur coat, the crude bone ear piercings, and the mountains behind them didn't make Tony think of Gene's native Beijing. But the baby in the woman's arms could only be Gene. He had his mother's skin and his father's eyes, and his hands were clasped around one of the Rings, which hung around his mother's neck on a thick string.

There was writing on the paper. It wasn't Chinese. Tony had learned some basic hanzhi from Gene during their quest to find the Rings. Tony was hardly fluent; he knew only the basics a Chinese third grader would at this point. Still, that was enough to make him realize that the writing wasn't Chinese, and it didn't look like the Japanese katakana and hiragana that Tony had seen in his many years of interacting with foreign programmers. He handled the picture carefully, closing Gene's locker after grabbing the boy's spare keys. This was one of Gene's few prized possessions, it had to be, because Gene's parents were both dead and gone now. Their image, however, still remained, and it was Tony's only clue to unlocking Gene's past.

It had often been said that a picture said more than a thousand words, but this time the words were all foreign. They had to be taken home and run through the computer at length. Tony studied the couple closely. Gene's biological father had a soft smile, much like Howard Stark's. His arm was around his wife and his eyes were on his infant son. The tenderness was plainly visible even to someone with Tony's problems reading human emotions. Gene's mother looked plump and cheerful, her smile tired but genuine. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold, her dark eyes sparkling. They were so happy, like any young parents were. It struck Tony then that when the picture was taken they had thought they would raise Gene where they were, in their home country, probably with their extended family nearby as was the usual in China. They thought that their little boy would grow up in the white house behind them with the red shutters; they had expected he would play in the yard with the small fence made of sticks. They had no idea that one day they would both be dead and Gene would be beaten and abused by his stepfather in a land where no one spoke his native tongue. Suddenly the brunette felt a wave of sympathy for his enemy. How had it all gone wrong? When had it changed into this nightmare for Gene? How had these people met their end, when sixteen years ago they had a good home, a steady income, a baby and a future ahead of them? Pepper had told Tony that Zhang had burned hanzhi into Gene's skin. How had such an evil man come into the life of such normal, peaceful, good people?

The computer told him that the script was that of the Yi people in China. It translated the words perfectly: _Sarantuyaa Khan, 15, Aung Htain Kyi, 19, _and, under that, _Temugin Kyi Khan, 1._ Gene's parents. His mother and father. And his birth name, his real name, which wasn't the Chinese Jianyu his step father had demanded he have as his legal name now. The name on the school transcripts and in the databases wasn't his real one. He hadn't been born Chinese, not ethnically. He wasn't Mandarin, wasn't even born anywhere near Beijing. He was Yi and Mongolian. That meant he had been born tens of thousands of miles away. So why was he in Beijing, let alone in the United States? The answer hit him like a ton of bricks. Xin Zhang. Before that man had entered their life, the Kyi-Khan family had been happy. They'd had such a bright future ahead of them. Tony could close his eyes and picture the little boy going to the village school with other kids who spoke his native tongue, could see him running home to tell his mother they'd started the Chinese alphabet today. Temugin was never meant to be beaten, abused and in a foreign land without any friends or support. Tony's fists clenched and he felt like punching something. This wasn't how it was supposed to be.

He began researching Gene's parents. It wasn't as easy as it would've been to research someone in the US. There was no database on Earth capable of holding the names and profiles of all Chinese people and it was an hour before he found a file on Gene's father. Aung Htain Kyi had been shot five years into his career as a police officer. The assailant was never captured, but described by some as a gray haired Chinese man who had searched the body after the event in the ensuing chaos. Sarantuyaa had taken Temugin and fled from the scene seeking to protect her child. She couldn't possibly have known what Tony now realized with a pang of horror and terror, that Xin Zhang had killed her husband simply to get the Rings. He was the reason her husband had his life and career cut short, the reason she found herself a single mother and desperately poor after her house burned to the ground. The police suspected arson. There the file stopped, but Tony didn't need it. It was plainly obvious what had happened. Zhang had swooped in with his criminal connections and dirty money and Sarantuyaa had been desperate to give her son a good life. She had no choice but to marry the man who promised to feed and educate her child, and then Zhang had gotten rid of her so that he could take the power of the Mandarin for himself.

"Gene…" Tony whispered to no one in particular. Suddenly he reached over and picked up his cell phone. He had to call Pepper, call Rhodey, talk to someone. Pepper picked up first. Annoyed, she ranted at him about skipping school for a full minute before stopping abruptly.

"Tony, are you _crying?_"

"Tell Rhodey I'll be out for a while. I need to talk to Sasha Nein at Stark International, I – I can't go through with the plan. We can't just kill Gene. We can't. I'll explain it later-"

"No, you'll explain it now," Pepper said, sounding desperate. "Please, Tony. Calm down and tell me what's going on."

He did. He could've told her about the files, the dates of the deaths, the sequence of events as they occurred on paper. But that would've taken the humanity out of it entirely. He talked instead about the white house with the red shutters on the windows, about Gene's father meeting Sarantuyaa when he was assigned to her village. He talked about the way the bullet had hit Aung Htain Kyi's chest and punctured the lung, leaving him drowning in his own blood while Gene watched. He talked about Sarantuyaa trying to keep Gene fed and clothed in the poorest part of China in the dead of winter, about how she probably had to steal food from poor farmer's markets and how they had to live on the streets. He talked about Zhang and how he burned down the house, how he shot a man and searched him like the lives he was destroying meant nothing. Tony was barely aware of his voice as he spoke. Mental images were roaring by like a whirlwind, and he could picture a starving, shaking toddler in Sarantuyaa's arms as she sat huddled under a bridge. He could picture the life Gene was supposed to have, shattered in an instant because some low level mob boss wanted more power.

"We need to talk to him. We need to find him. Pepper, we can't kill him. Don't you see? He's just like me. He's an orphan and he's angry at the world for what happened. I know what he's feeling right now, that fury so hot its like being burned alive but you can't stop being angry because then you'd break down and you're not sure if you'd ever get it back together if you did. I know that because that's been my reality ever since the plane crash. I can't just send psychics in to rip him apart. He's not an evil overlord. He's not a villain in some comic that the good guys need to vanquish. He's just a kid. We're all just kids, broken, foolish, nerdy kids trying to do the best we can and he needs us to save him from himself. We have to. He's part of the family, even if he is a jackass."

By now Pepper was trying not to cry, too. "Okay. You go talk to Nein," she said softly. "I – I'll go talk to Rhodey. And then we'll figure out what to do next, together. I don't know what we're going to do, but that's never stopped us from going on crazy adventures before, right?"

He could hear the emotions in her voice, sympathy and compassion mixed with the lingering pain of betrayal and uncertainty about the future. He could feel it in his own mind, the same vortex of emotions. Everything was so complicated and it was only getting worse as they went along. It's always darkest before the dawn, his father used to say. Pepper had been through so much alongside him, she'd seen one of her best friends through a suicide attempt and an all eclipsing alcohol addiction. Then her world had been turned upside down again, by someone she loved dearly, and now he was asking her to try to handle this. He was dumping the weight of Gene's past on her even when she already had so much to deal with in her life. He felt guilty… but he would not lie to his family anymore. He would tell them the truth when they asked because they deserved to know. No one could ever trust him if he held back the truth all the time.

"Pepper," he told her, "It'll be okay. We're going to get our Gene back. I promise. I love you and it'll be okay, alright?"

She inhaled deeply. "Okay. Okay, I'm okay. Call me when you're done talking to Sasha."

"I will. Bye."

"Bye," she whispered back. Only after he hung up did she add, in a voice that was barely audible, "I love you too, Tony."


	33. Inner Universe

**Author's Notes: **At the risk of sounding sappy, I'd like to thank my reviewers for reading this entirely too long, increasingly lengthy soap opera like fanfic. The fact that everyone has stuck with me through the last seventy thousand words is amazing to me, and I promise to have the resolution of the Gene situation done soon. After that I'll probably make a separate fanfic that's more Rhodey and Pepper centric than Elysium Lost, but I'm not sure what I'd call this theoretical sequel to EL.

Anyway, thank you all for reading and feel free to tell me if this is my official jumping the shark moment. Reviews telling me what I'm doing wrong are always appreciated, as are reviewers telling me what I did right. I can only improve with your help, loyal readers. (And if you've slogged through all seventy three thousand words, you are very definitely a loyal reader at this point.)

* * *

_When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with. And that is what I gave them._ – Anais Nin

_Everyone hides who they are at least some of their time. Sometimes you bury that part of yourself so deeply that you have to be reminded it's there at all. And sometimes you just want to forget who you are all together. _– Dexter Morgan, from Showtime's Dexter

* * *

Rhodey stares at the ceiling of the bathroom.

Tony is in Mongolia, Ulan Batar to be exact, on some hare brained scheme that he didn't feel the need to inform Rhodey about. Pepper knows, though, which makes Rhodey wince a little inside. He's beginning to wonder how much he can take. But he's Rhodey. He has to take all of this crap. He has to. He's the team mom. That's his job. He's not allowed to get tired of this. He's the one everybody vents their problems to and the one who gives pep talks to his friends. He's Rhodey, the guy everyone relies on. He doesn't get to feel bad. He has to be strong for Tony and Pepper. He's the one who makes sure they get to school on time, the one who keeps them all afloat academically in the midst of this madness. He doesn't get to have a break from this. There are no breaks for Rhodey, no times where he leans on someone's shoulder. It's always the other way alone.

Rhodey doesn't get to hurt.

He has retreated to the boys' bathroom at school. When _he_ leaves he comes back. His father would kill him if he didn't. He has to go back to class in a few minutes and take notes so he can cover for both his friends, and he has to get perfect grades so his father will be proud. So his father won't be angry with him for slipping up. How many times in his life has Rhodey heard his father rant about needing a perfect record to get into college? His father hasn't spoken to him since Pepper got them all detention. That's pretty typical for his father – there's no sympathy for his son. Not after Quentin and Seth, no, Rhodey's father was too soft on them, and look how they turned out. All this pressure is for Rhodey's own good. He has to be punished or he'll never learn. If he doesn't suffer the consequences of his actions then he'll slack off and boom, no more college and no more scholarships. And it's not like Rhodey's father's vindictiveness and utter absence from the home most of the time was what caused Seth and Quentin to become who they were. No, the problem was that he wasn't absent enough or harsh enough.

The one person Rhodey used to lean on was Tony. Now Tony's too preoccupied with Gene and Pepper. Gene, a backstabbing mentally ill abuse victim with a possible alcohol problem, and Pepper, a spazz who constantly got kidnapped and needed to be rescued. Both were far more important to the brunette than his best friend since preschool. He is completely forgotten by the sidelines. His father has not spoken to him in a month. His father has not called the house since Seth returned because he will not accept that 'that terrorist' is living with them again. Seth is unsurprised. The Rhodes boys are used to being not good enough. That's how they've lived their entire lives. Rhodey isn't good enough for his father, his mother or apparently Tony. All those tough times where the black boy was there for him don't mean shit. Rhodey hasn't gotten so much as a phone call or a text from him. He's so sick of this, he really is.

But what does it matter? Rhodey has no problems. Rhodey's parents are way better off than any other people in their church; they're upper middle class black people, perfect. Rhodey gets good grades and he's everyone's moral compass. You can count on Rhodey to point out when the emperor's wearing no clothes and Rhodey never misbehaves. He has never gotten drunk. He's never kissed a girl because no girl could ever meet his parents' high standards. He's never been out past curfew. He's got no problems at all. Rhodey is a flawless being and so no one ever stops to ask him how he's doing. No one ever asks him if he's okay. No one ever congratulates him for doing well on tests, or makes small talk with him, or asked him if he was okay now that Whitney's dead. No one ever thinks that maybe he's tired of being secret keeper. And he can't remember, even when he tries his damndest, to remember the last time someone told him it was going to be okay or hugged him. Any of these things would involve treating him like a person.

He's not. Not to the world, anyway. To them he's just Tony's Mom, the good guy, the black bookworm with the gray jacket. He's the back up, the tool, the thing you use to make things right. In a way, he's begun to feel more and more like he's playing parts. He's the sidekick, the perfect son, the average student, the listener, the lecturer. He isn't himself, just a series of roles that he plays as people demand. No one sees the person beneath the roles anymore. Tony outshines him, Pepper is louder than him and he's just part of the background. No ever thinks for one second about how he might feel about any of it. His parents think nothing about commanding him around, planning out his entire life without his consent or input. Tony feels free to leave the country whenever he pleases without even a sticky note left behind in warning because he just doesn't care. No one does. Not about Rhodey. Rhodey isn't a person, he's a serious of useful services. He's the reliable one, the mature one, the polite one. Not real, in other words, just a tool.

He doesn't want to be like this. Rhodey doesn't want to be an object people pass around whenever they need it. He doesn't want to spend his life trying to be flawless. He doesn't want to be forced into schools he doesn't like and go on adventures inside active volcanoes with a super hero. Rhodey wants to cry over Whitney's death and he wants to forget Gene Khan and the Makluan Rings ever existed. He wants to tell someone how tired he is of searching for the rings. He wants to say he misses his father and he wants to be able to have some semblance of a choice in his career instead of letting his father choose it for him. He wants to take Tony aside and hug him because each time the boy goes out there on one of his crazy schemes Rhodey's afraid he's not coming back. Night after night nightmare of losing his brother and best friend haunt him. He's already lost Quentin once and he barely knew Seth before the boy came back. To lose Tony would be too much for him, but Tony doesn't seem to think of that before he makes his decisions.

He won't cry. He won't complain. He doesn't do that. He's the listener, the confidant, the free therapist to all his friends. He's not allowed to have problems anymore. Anymore? Ha. He _never_ was allowed to have problems like a normal kid. When he did he had to learn not to speak about them. That way his father didn't call him a sissy, whiner, or ungrateful brat. That way teachers didn't tell him not to be so negative. He has to be quiet and self contained or his mother will be terrified he's turning into the second coming of Seth. Rhodey has to hold up to everyone's standards or else there will be hell to pay. There's no choice in the matter and there never has been. That's what makes him want to scream – his life is so out of his control, and there's so much pressure, but this is the only way it can ever be. He's trapped by everyone around him. The hopelessness washes over him sometimes, an ocean he's adrift in and has always been adrift in since he could first remember.

Other people aren't trapped like this. Tony Stark gets to breakdown because his parents are dead and he's got an alcohol problem. Gene Khan is allowed to go mad because he's had his life ruined by a sociopathic crime lord. Pepper Potts gets to fall apart because the boy she was in love with betrayed them and tried to kill them all. James Rhodes has two living parents who have good jobs, he's got Iron Man for a best friend, and his grades are perfect. He doesn't get to be anything but okay. Tony tried to kill himself and wound up in therapy, loved and cared for in a good hospital, surrounded by friends and the closest thing to family he had left. If Rhodey tried that his father would be furious and he would never get to go to therapy since that would imply James Rhodes was weak. The Rhodes family didn't _do_ weak. Weak was a privilege reserved for normal people.

Rhodey stares up at the ceiling, sitting on the toilet seat without his pants down. He just needs a minute alone. He doesn't need the bathroom; he never does when he asks to go. Rhodey just needs a few seconds where he doesn't have to play any role or part. In these few moments he can be human. For the briefest fleeting seconds he is allowed to be himself: flawed, weak and vulnerable. Rhodey is thankful, suddenly, that he always wore track jackets ever since middle school. No one would think twice about him wearing long sleeves indoors and in summer heat. He's Rhodey – they suspect nothing. Not even Tony knows that his so called best friend is slowly breaking down inside. No one knows what he does in his precious few off hours, those blessed moments where he's truly alone. Rhodey reaches into the pocket on the inside of his jacket. No one would ever see it because of the way the pocket was built. Hand sewn, of course. He doesn't make mistakes like amateurs do. He's James Rhodes, the perfectionist.

There's no back up, no other. This is it. His mother searches his room regularly and his father does it sporadically. The only safe place for anything Rhodey wants to keep secret is on his own body. That doesn't bother him as much as it should. That's just how his life is. If Quentin and Seth are to be believed, that's the way it's always been in the Rhodes household, but Rhodey's okay with that. He can outsmart his parents when he needs to. Ever since he can remember life has been a challenge, a chore he was never entirely sure he was going to be able to handle. From day to day life was a series of acts that just got tougher with each passing year. Yet when he does this, for a little while, he's not worried or scared or tired anymore. Maybe it's not entirely right, but it's better than taking a bullet through the head, right? Or at least, that's what he tells himself as he double checks that no one's in the bathroom. Then he just focuses on the act itself.

He takes the blade into his hands and in a burst of speeds brings it down his forearm. It hurts more and is substantially more shallow if he does it quickly from certain angles. Tony would appreciate the scientific method behind his reasoning. He's not thinking about Tony, though, because suddenly everything is clear and in focus. Suddenly it's all going to be alright. He _is_ real, he _does_ have feelings, and he _can_ hurt. He isn't a tool people use, he's a person, he isn't a role he's playing, he's human. The red blossoms and the pain makes it all bearable. In a few minutes he will have to go back to the stress and weight of his life. In a few minutes he's going to have to try to be the father, mentor, and tutor figure for his friends and he'll have to be the flawless student for his parents. But for this moment, the present, he's free. He's valid. He _matters_.

The fresh cut has torn through old ones. That doesn't matter. Rhodey's parents have outlandishly high standards on who their son can date, so his physical appearance doesn't mean much to him. There's no girlfriend to catch him and hover over him like on TV. There's only the pain. It's like soothing heat scorching the icy, apathetic hell he lives in so often. He feels hot and warm and real. The plastic, fake feeling that haunts him is gone. Every second is a treasure. When he's in class, the ache and burn will stay with, a secret indulgence he knows he's not allowed to have. Rhodey isn't supposed to have problems or need to release the pain. He's not supposed to vent all the stress from the past few months. He's Rhodey. Tony and Pepper seem to assume that he just doesn't have any stress to deal with, like he's this inhuman maternal figure that can't be shaken. In truth he's just a person. Even if no one wants him to be human, even if everyone pretends he's always fine, he _is_ real and he proves it with wounds that confirm he is indeed flesh and blood.

He knows this is sick and wrong. He also knows that no one would care if they knew, though, and that's why he keeps doing it. No one would care about him, the person, the kid struggling under the pressure. His parents would be pissed their perfect son had strayed off the lifelong path they had worked so hard to force him onto. They would be furious he dared to be human. Tony would be worried about his so-called best friend – but could what they had really be called a friendship? Rhodey supported, he listened, he gave pep talks, he nurtured, and Tony ignored him, argued with him or occasionally admitted he was wrong. He never asked Rhodey how he was doing or listened to the other boy vent his own problems. Everything was always about Tony. Iron Man. Someone _important_. Rhodey wasn't worth listening to even before the armor came into his life. Now he's less than nothing. He's mission control on top of all the other things he has to be. And no one is there to save him if he has a complete breakdown. That's the truly frightening thing, the reason he can't let himself just be human in front of all of them. He knows that everyone would be disappointed, furious or indifferent, and he doesn't want to hurt them, not even his verbally abusive, perfectionist father.

Rhodey knows he should stop. He can't. He doesn't have anything else. He doesn't have any other release. This is the only freedom he's ever really been allowed in his life, the only relief. He can hurt. He can bleed. He's real. He's a person. He matters. Or so he tells himself periodically when the doubts and pain get to be too much to bear and he just wants it all to stop. He makes it stop, briefly, with this. He's not afraid of going too far and killing himself on accident because he knows how to avoid the major veins. He's not afraid of dying even if he did hit one because he's so very tired. That's all this is. He's exhausted. All these months of having to hold Team Iron Man together through thick and thin has drained him of all his energy. He's sick of having to be the responsible, reasonable, mature one all the time. Death is just a big nap where no one can wake you up to yell at you. He's not afraid of it. He doesn't want it, doesn't think about death all the time, but he's okay with the thought that this could kill him and he's okay with the fact that it's wrong. Wrong feels good. Wrong is keeping him alive.

His arms look terrible. So do his legs. And his chest. He doesn't care. The way his parents hover around him, no one is ever going to see him naked anyway. No one would want to even if his parents didn't hover. He's the boring mature one. No one wants him; he's just useful on occasion. No wonder Tony bonded with him. Is there anyone more easily manipulated and more reliable than James Rhodes? He's a pushover, a tool and a failure. If he didn't have this he doesn't know how he would ever make it through the day anymore. He's so sick of his life. Once the blood flow has stopped he wraps the fresh cuts in toilet paper. It's messy, not entirely sanitary and the tissue paper will bond with the scab, which will be a bitch to pull off later, but it will stop the bleeding entirely. No one ever has to know. And why would they suspect anything? Rhodey doesn't have problems.

There used to be anger in that statement when he made it in his head. He used to be angry at everyone for holding him to such a high standard. Now he's just exhausted. He can't even be angry at the way his life is. There's not enough soul left in him for that. Something inside him has died, that flaring temper that made everyone compare him to Seth and chastise him. That fiery temper is gone. The flame inside him has died. He's sleep walking through life now, just like everyone always wanted him to. He's obedient, quiet and he doesn't fight the responsibilities everyone keeps lumping on him. James Rhodes is officially his father's dream child. Funny, he didn't think that would feel like such a hallow victory.

Pepper isn't even aware of his presence when he returns. Happy mumbles something to another student about how Rhodey never 'pulls a Stark', which is now school vernacular for skipping. Of course not, Rhodey thought dryly, people skipped school to hang out with their friends, and no one wanted to spend their free time with Rhodey. Once Gene was back in the picture the love triangle would go on without him and he'd be forgotten entirely. Tony and Pepper could keep playing crush tag while Pepper flirted with Gene and Gene spent every spare second at Tony's side. Other than the Iron Man thing, Rhodey could vanish without them noticing. He's okay with that. He's used to it, being left out of romantic triangles. Before Whitney there was never a girl genuinely interested in him. He knows she might've just been using him too, but that's alright. If she was using him for assignments and a date to make Tony jealous he wasn't offended horribly by the prospect. At least she was nice. At least she cared.

A note gets passed from one kid to another, finally landing on Rhodey's desk. He's stunned when it is actually addressed to him. And it's not from Pepper, either. He is mildly suspicious that it might be a prank. Still, he opens it discreetly. It's from Luksa Freeman, and the fact that he doesn't throw the note away immediately says something about how bad the past few months have been. Normally, if the school's most shameless party girl sent him anything he wouldn't even have opened it. But he does, probably because it's lengthy and he's just desperate enough to care what a druggie has to say to him. It's better than being ignored or called Tony's mom for the hundredth time, isn't it?

_Rhodes, I was in the boy's bathroom on the second floor yesterday. I saw you at the sink. I'm not gonna tell you to stop but I'm scared for you. I know we've changed since middle school and you don't wanna talk to me nowadays but you'll __always__ be important to me. Please man, can we talk? I don't wanna lose you! I'm so scared. I know you're not a raver like me and that's not your scene but just because we do different things doesn't mean we should never talk to each other again. I miss you. I never understood why you decided we shouldn't be friends. Whatever I did, I'm sorry! Please don't isolate yourself. I'm right here if you need me, you know. Always will be. Love and peace, Luksa_

Her phone number is scribbled at the bottom. He freezes. His father would kill him if he knew his son was talking to a low income, I-got-here-on-grades-alone, weed smoking raver with braided hair. Too ghetto. Too black. Rhodey will never be allowed to see her. He wasn't before and he's sure his father would be equally against him 'consorting' with 'that kind of girl' now. But his father is going to be gone for the next five months. Tony and Pepper will be busy with each other. And he's dying inside. He needs to be with someone, be with a human being who really cares about him. Otherwise he's going to self destruct soon. He can't let that happen. He glances back at her. She smiles timidly at him from the back row, the beads in her hair catching the light. She's scared for him right now. She cares. He's scared for a whole host of other reasons, but he can't take living up to his parent's expectations anymore. He needs someone to save him for once instead of having to save everyone himself.

One meeting couldn't hurt anything, could it?


	34. Tomorbaatar

**Author's Note: **Apologies to any readers who wanted Gene dead, but Tony's saving him… whether Gene likes it or not. Hopefully this won't come across as a tremendously unsubtle forgiveness Aesop. That's not what I'm aiming at. What I am aiming for is a more mature Tony. You know what they say – trauma builds character.

Also, for those wondering why Luksa was in the boy's bathroom and thus glimpsed Rhodey: When you gotta go, you gotta go. The girls bathroom was full and she couldn't wait for it to empty, so she did what many people do in desperate moments like that: she ducked into the boys room and prayed there was a stall open.

* * *

_Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend._ - Hercule Poirot

_The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong._- Gandhi

* * *

It was just after noon when the foreigner came knocking on the monastery's door.

He was young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, but his gray blue eyes were heavy like an old man's. They contained the weight of the pains of his life and the light of wisdom and enlightenment gained through experience and suffering. He was dressed in clothes that, while not that of a businessman, were clean and pressed. He bowed respectfully to the monks, his voice low as was polite inside the monastery, and he asked if it was true that Enkh Khan resided here. His voice was tired and determined. There was sweat on him that indicated he had been on this quest for the better part of the day. Though normally a foreigner would not be allowed any further into the building than was absolutely necessary, in this case an exception was made.

"I must speak with Enkh Khan. His grandson, Temugin, is not dead as he was led to believe so many years ago," the white man told the head of the monastery solemnly. "I am no tourist here to ignorantly gawk at your people's culture. I am Temguin's best friend, and I will wait here all day until Enkh can talk to me if that is what you wish. I don't want to cause trouble or disrupt your day."

The old man laughed softly. "Young master, there is no need for such fear. You are welcome to come inside these hallowed halls. We will see to it that Enkh speaks to you shortly; Temugin has always been in his heart."

Left in the presence of several other monks, he allowed himself to be led to a room. In it, the walls were covered with pictures of people. Some were old and black and white, some were painfully new, but there was a candle in the center of the room for each of them on a high raised altar. The brunette made his way to the walls, eyes scanning the faces he saw before him. Finally, when he found Temugin's picture, he took it tenderly into his hands. Enkh's only surviving picture of his grandson has been taken when Temugin was only five days old, his black hair just faint wisps and his golden eyes rounder. Still, there could be no mistaking it was the same person. The way the foreigner's face softened at the sight of him was proof positive of that.

"Gene… different photo, same stupid hair, huh buddy?" he muttered to himself, forgetting for a moment that other people were still in the room. "Guess some things never change." He scanned the wall suddenly, as if a thought had just occurred to him. "Now, where are your parents…?"

"They are not there," a new voice said behind him. "I have no photos of my dear Sarantuyaa or her husband."

The brunette smiled sadly. It was a smile that said he, too, had lost someone dear to him. "Then you should have this," he said, reaching into his pocket and producing a picture of her. "Courtesy of Temugin."

In spite of himself, Enkh found his eyes filling with tears. "Thank you, child. It means more than you can ever understand." He sniffed, then straightened. "I do not believe I know your name."

"Anthony Stark," he replied quickly. "I am a classmate of your grandson's, and one of his best friends. Even if Gene wouldn't admit that publicly," he added under his breath, causing the older man to smile. "He's a stubborn guy, sometimes. He likes to act tough."

"Ah, then he is truly his mother's child. Come, we will go to my room. We have much to discuss."

"More than you know," Anthony said softly, sadly, and his eyes were that of an old man's. He met Enkh's dark black eyes steadily. "It is very complicated. Things were very hard for Gene – excuse me, Temugin – growing up after his mother was murdered by Zhang."

Enkh gasped, then winced as if he had been struck. "I knew it. I knew that man was behind it, but no one listens to the elderly in these times. They said I was just an angry old man, and perhaps I was, but that didn't mean I was wrong."

Anthony placed a hand on the old man's shoulder for a moment, and then let it fall. There were no words that could've been spoken that would have mended this wound. He knew better than to try. Instead the white man followed silently behind him. Though physically the younger man was in good shape, his eyes were tired. Enkh had the sudden thought that perhaps this visit would not be as happy as he had thought when he first heard the news. For a brief moment his heart had soared with hope and joy that his grandson was alive. For a few fleeting seconds he had even dared to hope his daughter might still live. But Anthony had not come all this way to tell him lies. He came speaking only the truth, unpleasant and heart wrenching though it was. With the awkwardness that came with the newness of the gesture the boy bowed to several monks who passed, respectfully stepping aside for his elders. His concentrated effort at politeness was making Enkh nervous. Some terrible had happened, hadn't it?

"Where is Temugin now?" Enkh asked, his silver hair catching the light as they stepped into his room. His eyes were zeroed in on the foreigner's face. "Where did you come from? Why are you here? What of Zhang? Why isn't Temugin here himself? How is it a foreigner knows such good Mongolian? What does my grandson look like now? Why-"

"One question at a time. In no particular order, the answers are that I am from the United States, Zhang is missing and presumed dead, Gene doesn't know you're alive – probably thanks to Zhang, come to think of it – I don't know where Gene is now, and this device on my ears is translating what I say into Mongolian and what you say into English so that I can understand it. There wasn't nearly enough time to learn Mongolian. I had to find you as soon as possible." Anthony fiddled with his pocket computer for a moment before handing it to Enkh. "This is what Gene looks like now."

Silence fell. Stunned, emotional silence. Then, like a burst of water breaking through a damn, sixteen years of repressed grief, pain and loss came to the surface, and Enkh Khan found himself shaking with the sheer force of it.

"Gene… Temugin, my Temugin, that's him. You weren't lying, you really found him…" Tears began to slide down the old man's cheeks as he cautiously took the device into his hands. "He has his father's eyes," he whispered softly. "Aung was a good man. Poor, true, very poor, but there was never a man more noble than he was, so strong and brave. He cared so much for the people of the world, all of them, even choosing to work in China in the badlands where we then lived purely out of compassion. He… he never got to see his son grow up. He would have been so proud, his son in America, in their schools – he could never have afforded such an education for him, though he tried his hardest. My lord, look at Temugin, he's practically a man now…"

"I don't go on illegal cross-continental journeys to tug at your heart strings or mess with your head. I'm here because Temugin needs your help." Anthony placed his hands on the older man's shoulders, eyes serious and sincere. "I know about the Makluan Rings. I know the Khan family has passed down the power of the Mandarin for centuries. I know that Zhang stole that power and Gene stole it back. What I don't know is how to stop Gene now that he's one on an obsessive quest for their power. It's like there are two of him sometimes. There's the kind hearted jerk that saved his best friend from the Maggia and came to visit me in the hospital, the guy who laughs with me when we do stupid things. Then there's the mad man, the cold hearted murderer who wants the Rings at the cost of everything else in his life. If he doesn't stop on this path, there are people out there who will kill him to keep him from destroying more lives in the process. But I don't think the madman is the real Gene, or the real Mandarin. I won't let him be struck down like a dog. Please, Mr. Khan…"

"Enkh, call me Enkh," Gene's grandfather replied, staring down at the picture of Gene, Tony, Pepper and Rhodey. "You are like his brother, so you are like my son. You did the right thing, coming here. I had feared this years ago at Temugin's birth, that he might inherit the family's curse…"

"Curse?" Anthony asked, eyes narrowing slightly. "Please, tell me why things are turning out this way. I need to know."

He sighed heavily. "It is not something we had a name for, not back then. My mother, before that, her uncle, before him his mother, going back as far as our family has records, a curse that no one understood properly before. Medical science is a foreign concept to Mongolia, you see. We only knew that there were two minds in one body, two people fighting for control. It is the affliction of the Khan family. It goes back to the days of Genghis Khan himself, though it is an extremely well kept secret."

"Gene…"

"Is not only Temugin," the old man confirmed gravely. "Somewhere inside him there is another. That man is the one seeking the Rings, committing murder, and he does it with good intentions. The second soul, as it is known to the Khans, is there to protect the first. In Zhang's care the only way to survive would have been to let Temugin hide behind him. I don't know what that monster did to him, but the results are plain to see. Oh, my poor son, my only grandchild…"

"How can I help him?" Stark pleaded, sounding desperate. "I don't know what to do. Ever since he took the Rings I earned he's been on a rampage."

Enkh Khan stared at him as if stunned into silence. "You passed the Rings tests?"

"Some of them," Tony confirmed. "Three, actually. My father passed one other. Why?"

"Only an exceptionally good man may pass any one test, let alone three. You must be clever, brave, and tremendously noble." He reached into his robe and pulled off his necklace. He placed it, complete with one Ring, into Tony's palm. "Take this, young Anthony. This is the Ring of the Mind. With it you will be able to control anyone, even the Mandarin himself, and perhaps you can talk some sense into my poor afflicted grandson."

"But the Rings don't work for foreigners." Anthony frowned. "And this is a lot of power to be giving over to someone you barely know. It could be misused so many ways-"

"You are the rightful bearer of three Rings; but this is not the only reason why I trust you. Young master, you came across the world to find a way to save Temugin. To kill him would be the easiest option and to declare him a monster a perfect rationalization, but you did not do that. You came here. You sought me out, that you may solve this conflict without the loss of life. You are much of what the original Mandarin was – a peacekeeper in a society then ruled by warlords, a beacon of hope in the dark. I have told the Ring to obey you despite your foreign blood, and it will."

"But I thought about killing Gene," he protested, looking ashamed. "I thought about it, to protect my family. I don't deserve this power if that's the first place my mind goes." He held out the Ring to Enkh. "I can't take this. I'm too scared of hurting someone with it. Everyone who gets handed this kind of power goes mad and I couldn't life with myself if I made everything worse."

Enkh reached out, curled Tony's fingers around the Ring into a fist, and placed his hands on top of the boy's. "Anthony, we all think horrible things. What matters is what we do in this world. You respect power. I trust you with this."

Anthony looked at him then, his storm colored eyes vulnerable and open. "But _I_ don't trust myself with this. Not anymore."

Perhaps it was the result of being a father, perhaps it was because Enkh had spent his life dedicated to finding inner peace and easing the suffering of others, but it occurred to him then that Tony Stark was closer to a child than a man. He looked at him compassionately, and gestured for him to sit down. The boy did, looking confused and lost. It was in his eyes. He was good at keeping up appearances, at being polite and formal, yet deep within there was still something wrong. Enkh sat down beside him on the simple wooden bench and began to see the balance in things. Anthony Stark had come here bearing the gift of good news and a chance at bringing the shattered remnants of the Khan family back together. In return, the universe asked that Enkh do his part by healing the wounds of the young man's soul, something he would gladly do.

"I'm Iron Man!" the white boy confessed suddenly. "The super hero, the metal swoosh flying around New York, the guy all the papers speculate on, and you know what? I'm not that great!" He glared at a newspaper on Enkh's table bearing his image. "I'm not some noble soul trying to make the world better, I'm not a savior, I'm not a hero. I never have been! I'm just a kid, a little boy who lost his dad and who's just trying to do damage control. That's what I'm doing, trying to keep people from dying or getting hurt, and I can't even do that correctly – look at all the mistakes I've made, all the times I failed. I've lost my father, one of my best friends, _her_ father, I nearly lost everyone closest to me, and do you know why? It's because of me. I get so caught up in myself and my own problems that I can't help anyone around me! I get so angry all logic and reason goes straight out the window! The greatest threat to Anthony Stark is Anthony Stark, and the only consistent factor in all my dysfunctional relationships is me. _I'm_ the problem!"

Enkh let the boy vent. There was a lot of regret still lingering inside him, like a parasite he couldn't shake. He watched the emotions play out across the boy's face. He was disappointed in himself, he was angry with who he used to be, and yet he couldn't see that he had changed. He was not the same man, that much was evident even to someone who had just met him. Enkh had known Iron Man for little more than half an hour, and he could still see it. The monk could see the good intentions, the desperate desire to save the world, the regret and pain the hero carried inside himself to this day. He was uncannily self aware. He knew all too well what his faults were; his shortcomings were ever present in his mind's eye and he could not tolerate them. This was a far cry from the way the world's press had depicted the man of iron, but Enkh was not surprised. Underneath the suit there was still a human being, after all.

"It's like that song," Tony continued, suddenly sounding tired. "How can I trust anyone else when I can't even trust myself, and how can I love anyone else when I can't even love myself? That's me. That's always been me."

"Listen to me. Listen to me very clearly, Anthony Stark. You are not perfect. You have faults. You may indeed have made grave mistakes in the past. But these things are in the past and they cannot be changed. You have experienced many setbacks, many moments of sadness, hatred and rage. And you have grown from them." Enkh placed a hand on the boy's shoulder. "You have brought me hope when I had long abandoned it and you are refusing to simply let Temugin destroy himself even when the situation is dire. You are forgiving of him, you are conscious of your power, you are remarkably aware of your own failings. You are Iron Man, a hero to your people, Anthony Stark, a true friend, and the rightful owner of the Makluan Rings. You are not a problem. You are a solution. I'm blessed to have met you."

Tony rubbed at his eyes, looking exhausted. His life was flashing before his eyes, and what he saw wasn't pretty. He looked at Temugin's grandfather thoughtfully. "Do you really trust me with this? Even knowing that if I stop Gene, I'll end up having access to six of the Rings?"

"I do. It is the men who have wielded great power and thought they were perfect candidates for the job who have always done the most harm." Enkh smiled warmly. "To doubt your worthiness is to prove it."

Anthony sighed heavily and rose to his feet. "Let's hope you're right. Temugin's running out of time before his enemies try to gun him down. I may not be the best candidate for this, but I'll have to do." He paused. "It's illegal, but I could get him into Mongolia. He could live with you if you want. He has no place left to stay in the United States and if I – _when_ I snap him out of this, he'll need support. Family."

The Mongolian man frowned and shook his head as Stark lingered in the doorway. "I can't take him in. I'm too old, too sickly and the city is not what he needs to recover." Anthony's face fell, but he nodded as if this made sense and turned to go. "His other grandparents live in the countryside, in the province of Zavhan. They have learned Mongolian and left China forever. Their old home reminds them too much of their past tragedy, but they have carved out a niche in Zavhan for themselves. I am sure that if you talked to them they would take their grandson in with open arms."

Tony's relief was so powerful he nearly shook. "I'll go there right away. Thank you for everything, Enkh Khan. Thank you so much."

"No, it is I who should be thanking you. For the first time in many years, I will sleep peacefully tonight knowing my grandson's fate and that of the Rings is in your hands. Thank you, Tomorbaatar."

The foreigner crinkled his nose in confusion. "Tomorbaatar?" he asked.

"It means iron hero. It is your name in this land. And should you need an alias to use with the authorities, feel free to take the name Khan as well with my blessing."

The magnitude of this statement was not lost on Tony. He could think of no words to describe his gratitude, so instead he simply bowed and left, the Ring glowing warmly against his hand. He could feel its power in his fingers. Feeling the familiar weight of responsibility settle around his shoulders, he found a place to change into his armor and focused his thoughts on Temugin. Everything was coming to a climax, a conclusion, for better or worse. He wasn't sure if he was up to this task, but he would die trying if he had to, if it meant he could save Temugin.

After all, they were brothers now.


	35. Lineage

**Author's Note: **After debating whether or not Zhang's reveal to Gene about his brother in chapter 27 was a lie or not, I decided to make it a half truth. Partly that's because I can't take the levels of darkness this fic was reaching, and partly that's because if Zhang had a back up plan he'd dispose of Gene immediately.

Also, I hope this chapter is okay. I was sick the past few days, so this is sort of a fever induced chapter. Hopefully it's not too awful. Sorry if it is. I'm still a little out of it.

* * *

___"Falling from heaven is not as painful as surviving the impact."_ – Tormented Angel, from Magic: The Gathering

_Maybe this world is another planet's Hell._ – Aldrous Huxley, author

* * *

One of Gene's oldest memories was of his father teaching him about mean people.

They had gone to the market. Too many years had passed for Gene to remember why they had gone to the city (a small town by American standards) or what they had gotten there. What he remembered was his father driving their ox pulled wagon home. People in the city had sneered at him, people with darker eyes than his father who spoke a strange fluttering language. Temugin had watched with growing confusion as the voices grew louder and more distinct. Even a four year old could tell they were being mean. But his father smiled warmly at them before simply taking his son's hand and walking away. Temugin had wanted to say something to the men, though he didn't know what. He didn't like the way they pointed to the oxen and laughed.

He had sat on his father's lap on the way home. He always did. Temugin loved it. Other fathers, proper Mongolian ones, didn't let their children ride like that because of how their wagons were built. Temugin's father had made his Yi styled wagon deliberately so that, should anyone ever be hurt, he could move them to where they could get help if he had to. At the time it seemed so brilliant to Temugin. Not just the idea; that his father could get wood and bits of metal and make something that worked so well was astounding. His father seemed to know everything. His father could make soup out of roots that brought down the fever in sick people. His father could speak many languages that sounded like nonsense to his son. He could even catch bad guys.

"Why were those men mean to you?" Temugin had asked him bluntly, twisting to look up into his father's face. "Don't they know you know everything?"

Aung had laughed, his golden eyes lighting up. They were always glowing, it seemed to Gene now. All his memories of his father – and there were very few – involved his eyes, so warm and kind. They were the color of topaz, never quite orange, brown or gold, but rather a mixture of all three at once. His hair was long and tied back, a few strands always slipping out to frame his heart shaped face. Temugin thought he was the most perfect man ever. All men should look like his father; his father was amazing. He smiled down at his son so that he knew the man wasn't laughing at him and spoke softly, his Mongolian always smoother and more flowing than anyone else's. It was one of those magical things about him that made him Temugin's favorite person. These little things would later be cherished, held close to Temugin's heart as he lay broken and beaten on Zhang's floor.

He would close his eyes, put his arms around himself and will the memories back. The scent of the earth after it rained. That was how his father smelled. After the man's death, a bloody and shaking Gene would whisper the name Aung Htain Kyi to himself and something within him would always stir. He was not the son of a monster. He was the son of Aung, a man who knew things that could never be learned at any school.

"I don't know everything. I don't want to. That would be boring, my son. Think about it." After a pause in which Aung could _see_ Temugin think about it, he beamed down at his son. Everything Temugin did was endearing to him, every action charming and wonderful. He loved him so much that he had even bought him a sugary treat in town, an action that would land Aung in hot water once his wife found out. "But they were talking about our wagon, my hair beads, and your jacket."

Temugin looked at his jacket as if just remembering it was on. It had beads sewn onto it by Aung himself, late at night whenever he was restless. The words were in Yi script, and while Gene didn't know all of them, he knew they were good ones like courage, love and his parents' names. He was proud of it. No one else's father made them things like this. His father was, Temugin thought sometimes, better than the other fathers. He could do anything. He frowned suddenly. He didn't know the words the men were saying, but it sounded like they were making fun of him. That meant they were making fun of his father. If they had been kids Temugin wouldn't have let them, he'd have told them to be quiet.

"So why didn't you talk to them? You could've called them monkey face. That _always_ works," the four year old informed his father solemnly. His serious face made his father chuckle. Temugin was a very serious boy sometimes, usually about cookies, the monster the children were convinced was in the woods, and spiders, which were his friends. The three spiders in Temugin's room even had names. Squishing them was not an option. They were guests.

"You're your mother's son, serious and all grown up." Aung smirked when his son drew himself up taller, proudly. "But I don't call people names. I don't talk to mean people. I just feel sorry for them."

"Why?"

"Mean people have always had people be mean to them in the past. They aren't born this way, Temugin. People were mean to them so many times that they don't even think niceness exists anymore, so they're mean to people now. That way no one will ever get close enough to them to hurt them." Aung wondered if his explanation was going over his son's head. The child's face was scrunched in thought.

"But you're not mean. You'd never hurt them. You like people. Mother says that's why you talk so much." Temugin added as an afterthought, "And that's why you save people. You're a good guy."

"They don't know that, Temugin. They only know that everyone else has been cruel and hurtful to them. They're scared everyone else they meet will be. So they try to strike first. They're like beaten dogs, trying to bite before they get hit. Just like puppies, they don't know that no hit is coming." Aung's expression hardened and his eyes went distant. "Someone hurt them before. That's why they're vicious now."

Temugin was now thoroughly confused. "Can't you make a soup and fix them?"

The Yi man laughed, but it was a sad, low sound. "If only it was that easy. No, Temugin, no one soup is strong enough for that."

"You'd need two bowls?" his son asked, and Aung laughed outright, a more genuine laugh that lit up his eyes. "Three, maybe?"

"You'd need an endless supply of soup," replied his wise and all knowing father. "You'd need lots of laughter, and many late nights spent staring at a fire talking, and summer evenings playing ball, and lots of smiles. No one can be fixed with just one soup, just one laugh, and just one talk. It takes a long time, longer the more people were mean to them in the past."

"Grown ups play ball?" Temugin asked. He'd never seen the other adults do it, but then again, the balls were kept on shelves that only adults could reach. Maybe they played when he wasn't looking, just like his father said the grass and trees grew only at night so no one would watch.

"Grown ups, Temugin, play ball, tell silly stories, and eat sugar straight from the bag. We just don't admit to it. We don't want our kids to think we're silly or stupid."

The four year old leaned into his father's chest, wrapping his small arms around his father's waist under jacket, which was stuffed with goose feathers and warm to the touch. He closed his eyes and smiled happily. "You're not stupid. You're smarter than anyone else in the whole world! I want to be just like you when I'm grown up." He cracked open one eye and looked up at his father to add, "But not with the hair. You look like a woman."

"I love you too, Temugin," Aung said, even thought Temugin didn't remember saying I love you to his father. But his dad was just weird like that. He said that whenever his wife told him he snored like a monster or when one of the oxen tried to kick him. Temugin's father was really odd. The good kind of odd, though, Temugin thought to himself as he nuzzled against his dad.

Soon he was half asleep on his father's lap. The man stopped the oxen briefly to button up his thick coat with Temugin snuggled between it and his father's chest. His son was asleep in a few minutes, or so his father thought. Really Temugin had his eyes open, thinking all kinds of disjointed thoughts about fathers, mean people and soup. His father's coat smelled like their house, like the smoke from the bonfire the village men had periodically when they got together to talk. The thud sounds of the oxen walking and the gentle bobbing up and down of the road soothed something deep inside the little boy. This was home. Not the house, itself, but this was what it meant to be happy. This was how it was supposed to be, and when Aung lapsed into an ancient Yi lullaby, Temugin went to sleep knowing he was loved and safe.

So long as his father was with him, he was always safe.

* * *

The bullet had hit Aung's left lung.

He didn't have any breath for last words. His world exploded in pain, so white hot it was almost cold, as his vision swirled with sparks and flecks of sudden snow. His body hit the dirt of the road and he didn't even feel it. His arms wanted to convulse, but his grit his teeth and tried to focus on Sarantuyaa and Temugin. His mouth, his breath, was filling up with blood. He was drowning where he lay. His child stared at him with wide, terrified eyes, golden as the wheat in sunlight. His precious Temugin, his son, was shaking in shock as Sarantuyaa took him in her arms.

"Bi chamd khairtai," Aung managed. "Bayartai…"

_I love you. Goodbye._

His body convulsed uncontrollably, blood spewing out of his mouth and soaking through his chest as he gasped for air. He sounded like he'd just run across the continent. His vision was unstable, switching between blurry and sharp. He did not see Temugin. His wife had run with him. He was safe. He was going to be okay. Aung would have smirked had pain like lightning not arched through his chest. He bit back a scream, drawing blood from the inside of his cheek. If his son heard him scream it would haunt him for the rest of his life. He had to be strong. He shook as if chilled though he felt hot as the son. Rolling onto his hands and knees, all four limbs shook with the effort to hold him up. But it helped; the blood was no longer drowning him so harshly. If he could get to a hospital he might make it. If he couldn't, he still had a duty to call this in.

"Criminal!" he barked into his walkie talkie. "Shooter!" he coughed and convulsed for a good thirty seconds before managing to add, "Riso Street…"

"My my, aren't you a brave little peasant?" sneered a voice above him. Feet came into view, as another bloody, excruciatingly painful coughing fit overtook the Yi man. "That shot should've killed you, Yi trash. My aim must have been off."

Aung glanced at him and then at the walkie talkie. "Chinese shooter!" he snapped, and the man above him angrily kicked the small device away, but the damage was done. Now the police knew the race and ethnicity of their shooter. The man would have to flee town to avoid being arrested, which would mark him as a suspect rather pointedly.

A swift kick to Aung's chest made him roll over, fists clenched so tightly that his fingernails drew blood. He would not scream. Temugin would hear him if he did. He had to keep calm. His whole body was shuddering now; blood pooling again inside him, and breathing became a fight that took all his energy and strength. He needed to shoot the man. His gun was still on him. Why couldn't he manage to do it? His arms were like dead weights at his sides as the Chinese man began patting him down, looking for something. His pockets contained a little money, an ID, a feather Temugin had given him, but whatever his attacker was looking for was not there.

It hit him then, as his vision began fading to black: the Rings. Through the thick, warm haze engulfing his thoughts, he managed to realize what that meant. Temugin, he thought, Sarantuyaa. No, no, he couldn't let this man kill them for the Rings. He couldn't let that happen to his family, his treasures. They were everything to him. They were the reason the sun set at night and rose in the morning. Tears began to leak out of Aung's eyes, not out of pain but anger. No, his family would not be taken from him. His shaking, pale hand clutched the gun, his fingers barely able to get around the trigger due to their convulsions. His vision was completely gone. All he had was sound and smell, and the feeling of hands on him, searching for the Ring. Aung shut his eyes and prayed with all his might that his family would be safe and might never know what he was about to do.

Then he pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit the Chinese man dead on. Blood spattered onto Aung's face from his murderer as the man withdrew quickly. There was a snarl, and foot steps sounded. More voices in Chinese, a chorus of them. Aung's Chinese was shaky at best. Now it was almost near unintelligible to him. He heard words like 'go', 'Tong', and 'doctor'. They were leaving. Aung would never be able to tell if he'd managed a lethal shot. He'd tried. He didn't want to hurt the man, he didn't want to cross the line from keeper of the peace to righteous murderer, but there had been no choice. He wanted to stop the man from hurting people. Not just Sarantuyaa or Temugin. Everyone. There was no telling how many lives the man would ruin with his cruel heart and affinity for violence, so it had to be done. Still, Aung knew that, had he lived, it would've been his greatest failure. Everything was going still and quiet. He didn't feel the ground underneath him, that rich hard brown earth that was its own pavement, or the sun's gentle beams on his cheek. All he knew was silence and pain.

_Bi chamd khairtai,_ Aung thought sadly, picturing his family. _Bayartai._

Then, there was no pain, only silence, and he was gone.

* * *

Sarantuyaa was sobbing.

Her child was crying out for her, his tiny hands reaching out blindly in the pale moonlight. His skin was the color of clouds in a blue sky. His legs were strong and already kicking at the new world he had suddenly been thrust into. His voice was surprisingly loud and steady. Despite the unbearable white hot inside her, she managed a smile when his eyes opened. He was beautiful. She had never seen such a perfect creature, not since the day her first son had been born. Tears were making their way down her face from the sheer amount of pain. Zhang had used a knife and a few people to hold her down. There was nothing to dull the pain and she was going to bleed out to death on the spot. She should be furious with him.

But she found she didn't give a damn about the Chinese monster. Her arms reached out as one Tong let go of her, and she picked up her baby boy. His hands latched onto her shirt collar. His eyes were not gray, they were silver and pure, shining with a light from within. He looked at her with pleading eyes. He didn't want anyone else to touch him, didn't want her to let him go. He nuzzled closer, sobs slowly dying down while his mother was nearly blinded with tears. She had never seen such a wonderful thing as her child's peaceful face. He was still breathing hard, as he had been ever since the umbilical cord was cut. It was normal for children born this high up in the mountains. Zhang had made sure that they were far from civilization. That way no one could challenge his story when he reported she and the child had died in childbirth – he was a monster, but a clever monster. Unfortunately, that meant that he saw the true meaning of the baby's appearance. The eyes were round like a Mongolian's. His eyes were like clouds in the full moon.

His hair was white.

Zhang didn't even have time to insult her before a swift fist to the back of his head forced him to crumple to the ground. In too much pain to stand or even sit up, she clutched her baby close. The startled Tong members fell in the span of but a few minutes. They had not been expecting an attack from within. Even she had, on her way up the mountain, had her doubts that everything would go according to plan. Only when the groans of fallen warriors around her were the only sounds in the still night did she dare to look up. The hood of a Tong henchman fell to the ground beside her as two strong arms reached for her; she saw the moon on his white hair and felt herself grow at peace. The deed had been done. Her second son's father had not abandoned his child.

"Xueqin!" she cried out, and he wrapped an arm around her, his albino eyes glowing in the night's light. "You have to leave." Her shaking, quickly paling body could do nothing more than hold their child, but her eyes conveyed the urgency silently. _Please,_ she begged him with all her heart, _save our baby._

"I am here," he replied softly, voice warm as his son reached out his hands for this stranger who seemed so familiar. The Tong man took in a shaky breath as he watched the child move, tears rolling down his face as he hung his head in shame. "I should never have let it get this far, I should have killed them all, taken you two and ran. I should never have let Zhang cut you. I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, my lady…"

"It's the only way, she said softly, and since Chinese had no past or present tense she was saying both that this was the only path now and before. Her pain had not dulled her senses so much that she could not think. She leaned up and brushed her lips to his. "This betrayal was risky enough. Now take him and run. And no matter what you do, do not kill anyone. No more bloodshed. It-"

"Only creates chaos," Xueqin murmured back. "I know. I didn't understand before I met you how precious life is. I swear to you that I will not kill anyone, never again. You have changed me." His tears fell onto her face as he held her close for the last time. "You saved me. From myself, from Zhang, from the Tong. My lady," he gazed into her dark gray eyes the color of metal dipped in ink, passion blazing in his cold, ice covered silver ones. "It is done as you have said. I am loyal only to you," he glanced at the child, "And to him."

She was freezing cold against him, and he stood, gathering the baby into his arms. He used the hood of his Tong uniform for a makeshift blanket. Then he took a deep breath, and began to walk away. Every step seemed a lifetime as he fought down the knowledge that the love of his life was dying slowly behind him. His steps became a run, and from there a full on sprint. He vanished into the night, only his white hair occasionally catching the light. In the depths of the forest he was untouchable and ghostly, a silent apparition who even the best of trackers would not have been able to follow. His son clutched his father's unruly hair like it would somehow protect him from the world. The infant didn't like the jostling, but he didn't cry out, squirming and wriggling in confusion. He did not understand why they had left his mother behind. He would not understand that for years to come. For now it was enough that he was alive.

His soul mate, his precious lady, was dead. He had held her down as it was done simply because she had asked him to. He never could deny her anything, Xueqin thought ruefully. From the first day he had seen the beautiful Khan he had been her slave. She was like a breath of fresh air after being drowned, the sun breaking through the clouds in the middle of a storm. She was compassion, and she was grace. Somehow she had looked through him and seen the good man inside the Tong uniform that even he had forgotten dwelled there. Her love had changed him, changed his life and his very mind. Xueqin had never felt anything that even came close to rivaling what he felt for Lady Sarantuyaa. She made the day begin. She made the sun rise. Her presence was enough to change the lives of all who knew her. Sarantuyaa had loved the world and everyone in it. Xueqin had thought the world to be a disgusting place and everyone in it a selfish monster.

She was all that he lived for. Let the Tong chase him, let his riches vanish, he didn't care. In his arms there was a treasure more precious than all the gold in China. Zhang would demand his head on a platter and Xueqin would gladly offer it so long as his child was safe first. No more senseless murder, no more violence and madness. He would go without a fight once his son was safe in Mongolia. The motherland had vast plains and a sea of tightly knit communities that the Tong had never been able to control. No one could conquer the people of their home, he thought when he pictured Sarantuyaa's defiant smile at the sight of her son. They could be beaten, raped, and killed, but there was no way to conquer that rebellious spirit that blazed inside of them. He looked down at the bundle in his arms and felt the absurd urge to laugh. No matter what Zhang would tell the Tong and poor, still captive Temugin, the truth of the matter was that the Chinese man had been defeated.

He caught his breath at the top of a mountain, and looking down at the train station below, he laughed, sounding and feeling both triumphant and utterly defeated. Though he knew he had not a second to spare, he managed to find time to look up at the moon, Sarantuyaa's namesake, and address the celestial being as if his lover's spirit could somehow hear him.

"One out of two isn't a passing score," he told the now crying baby, "But it's all that I could do." Thinking of Temugin, he winced. "I just hope your first son will not become the monster Zhang so wants him to be. Perhaps one day someone will come to save him, too."

And though it could've just been his imagination, the albino could've sworn the moon shone a little brighter at his words.


	36. Saving Him From Himself

**Author's Note:** And closely but surely we're creeping closer to the end of this thing. Time for some Psychonauts style therapy next chapter and some back ground building circa this chapter. (I'd put up a warning for slash, but if a one sided crush mentioned referenced in a character's past was enough to offend you, you wouldn't have made it through this fic this far.)

* * *

_You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough._ - Frank Crane

_I lie here paralytic inside this soul, screaming for you till my throat is numb. I wanna break out, I need a way out, I don't believe that it's gotta be this way. _– Rebirth by Skillet

* * *

Breathe in, breathe out.

Very slowly, very deliberately, become still. Let absolutely nothing be an accident. Every thought, every movement, each breath was controlled. Gene inhaled again, feeling the cold morning air enter him like a glass of water. He could feel the denim of his jeans press against his knees as he sat with his legs folded on the cool concrete. If he focused he could feel the crack in the concrete underneath him. If he focused on the sounds around him he could hear the birds and animals in the world around him, moving and stirring in the early dawn light. There was still life here, in spite of it all, though at this hour even the birds were not yet truly active. Give them a few minutes, however, and they would come alive with sound and movement. Gene inhaled deeply the scent of the frost covered world he was in, and felt his mind slowly begin to unfold like a flower before him. He was at peace.

On one side of the building there was a windowsill that, if one were exceptionally stupid or remarkably agile, could be stood on for long enough to reach up and grasp the underside of the metal fire escape. Provided you had no fear of heights whatsoever and good enough muscles, it was possible to climb up the underside to the third floor, where holding on to another ledge and using only your arms might enable you to move off to the side. There, on the corner of the building, there was a concrete platform. It was part of the outcropping used to shield all the doors from rain, and extended precisely five feet out in all directions. Granted no one else ever had the muscle strength to get up there, but it had been the key element in many a prankster's plan. When the building had been crammed full many a plan hinged on the outcropping. Water balloons, one student had sighed wistfully, looking at how it stood over the back road of the school, would work miracles here. Truly, incredible pranks could've been pulled off from that spot.

Unfortunately, Temugin had known better than to deliberately make trouble. And there were only two people capable of climbing like that who had ever attended in this school: Temugin Khan and Ai Li. Gene was capable of such a feat due to years of martial arts training, strict diet and the nature of the bullies he faced at this school. Ai had been capable of it due to sheer desperation and need. They had spent a large chunk of their childhoods up on this ledge, terrified of the world down below. This was the place that Temugin had spent years trapped in, the boarding school from Hell, the place Zhang had sent him just to get rid of him. He had been here so often in the past that he could still navigate the place without ever glancing at a map. This was Gene's old prison, and it was here that he fled now when he needed to get away from humanity as a whole. Here there were no students anymore, no humans at all, not even the homeless. The boarding school was too far out in the countryside for that. Here there was only nature and concrete and Temugin could try to sort out what was going on in his own mind for a while.

Once he had run through the halls of this building with Ai en tow, and breathless with excitement and fear they had climbed the stone ledges and windowsills until they were safe. Laying back breathless, full of adrenaline and terrified, their hearts pounding in their ears, they would laugh in that insane way people did when they'd just nearly died. Once, when he was nine years old, he had kissed one of his roommates on the mouth on a dare and had never lived it down for the rest of his years here. (It was on that day Gene Khan swore off of truth or dare for life and declared Americans idiots for coming up with it and spreading it to his home country.) Once when he was ten he had gotten his ass kicked by a group of bullies a year old than him and had only been spared further injury by a fellow Mongolian-Chinese mixed boy intervening. Gene could recall the way he'd felt then, indignant and grateful, happy and furious all at once. Once he had partaken in a food fight that got his entire year forced into cleaning duties that were so intense you'd have thought he'd blown the place up.

Gene had mixed feelings about this place, about the people who he'd spent his childhood with. Ai Li was dead, having been beaten and murdered by a boy two years older than her. It was hard to suppress the mental images. Gene had come back to his dorm and knew from the look in Jiang's eyes that something horrible had happened. His eternal roommate of three years had a stoic face, but hazel eyes that could convey whole conversations silently. Sucking in a deep breath, the Chinese boy found himself unable to focus on the present or on his meditation, drifting back to that horrible day where Temugin had lost yet another loved one. He remembered trying so hard not to cry that it hurt. He had shook in sheer emotion. He had burst like a damn, called Jiang a liar, slapped him, screamed incoherently, and it was like all the pain inside him had hit its crescendo. Then suddenly Jiang had him by the wrists and was holding Temugin back, physically and mentally. He hadn't said a word. He had simply pulled the shorter boy close into a tight embrace. They had lost their little sister. They had lost everything.

Except, that was, for each other. The quiet Jiang was Temugin's most loyal friend. Gene could never quite understand why. In the course of the six years they'd been at this hell hole of a school the Mongolian boy had yelled at, misblamed, ranted to, and accused his roommate of virtually every wrong in the book. Jiang covered for him when he had to, he helped Gene with his homework, he was always administering advice, and Gene had repaid him by being an unrepentant asshole. He had slapped the taller boy once. Jiang had simply rubbed his cheek and never mentioned it again. Why he put up with the little tyrant that he was saddled with, no one knew. Perhaps it was because Jiang had only a great grandmother awaiting him back home, all other relatives dead or in America pretending their old family didn't exist. Perhaps it was they were both inherently lonely creatures who preferred to be alone. Or maybe it was because they both really wanted friends, but knew better than to try. They weren't lonely by choice, they were lonely and set apart because they were smart. Jiang especially was good at seeing through lies; he could never be manipulated or bent to the will of the school's cliques and social hierarchy.

It was Jiang who had saved Temugin from this place. He had dropped subtle hints in Zhang's presence about the superiority of American schools, about how bilingual people would have an advantage in the business world. Temugin had watched in amazement as his soft spoken friend played Zhang like a flute, setting up the very future that had allowed the Mongolian to take his birth right. There was just something inherently persuasive about Jiang. His voice was soft and gentle, his expression eternally calm and collected. He could have made a real future for himself with the Tong if he had wanted to. Had he the desire he could have been rich. Instead he spent his time convincing Zhang that Temugin was destined for greater things than this school in the middle of nowhere. And Temugin had never even thanked him for it, never realized until now that the reason he wasn't the victim of an anti-Mongolian hate crime was Jiang.

_Why do I hurt everyone who cares about me?_ Gene asked himself suddenly. His mother, his father, Pepper, Tony, Jiang, Ai, even Rhodes – they had all cared for him in one way or another and he had turned his back on what that meant. He had never cried for the death of his best friend, for leaving the country of his other. He had stabbed his American friends in the back and simply run away. He had never done anything to help any of them, to benefit them in kind. People kept laying down their lives for him, bearing their souls to him, and he kept using them like puppets. All these years, even in the darkest of times he had allies who would do anything for him. They had no reason to be part of his life other than sheer kindness. He repaid that kindness with hatred and callousness. Forgoing even attempting to appear like he was meditating, Gene stared at the sky with a sudden tiredness that seemed to engulf him entirely. _What am I doing out here? Why am I like this?_

There was some other part of him fighting to get to the surface then, some wicked part of him that said it was all worth it. Somewhere inside Gene something said to him that everyone would've betrayed him eventually and then he'd have been sorry. He would have been hurt by someone if he'd have let them all have their way. His rational side, however, was in no mood for such pessimism. _Shut up_, he told that part of himself, annoyed. _They aren't evil._ He closed his eyes, feeling a migraine coming on. _They wouldn't have hurt me._ And something, some voice inside of him, laughed at that. Ai had been a girl and girls were always manipulating men, weren't they? He'd seen it often among the Tong. Pepper didn't seem like that kind of girl, but she could have been, all women could have been, for all he knew about them. How many times had he been told how romance ended badly, how often had he seen one lover turn on the other for money or power? How could he possibly trust Pepper, return her feelings for him, when he could never guarantee that those feelings were real and not a plot to lower his defenses?

_Jiang,_ he argued weakly against the voice. _Tony, and Jiang. They can be trusted even if the women can't._ His inner voice (demon? Subconscious? He had no clue) snickered at that. Hadn't it been, during that game of truth or dare, Jiang who had leaned over to kiss him without any hesitation, without any fear of what it would do to his reputation? Gene's mind warred with the duel notions that perhaps the other boy had been in love with him and perhaps he'd been trying to ruin Gene's reputation by making him look like a homophobe. He had never understood what that meant, why Jiang hadn't fought it or begged Gene to choose truth instead. Was it a trick? Was everything a trick? He didn't understand why it had happened. And Tony was a nightmare unto himself, so trusting and open and completely vulnerable. He was innocent and naive, a terrible liar and utterly good. But how did Gene know that wasn't a ruse, wasn't Tony's way of manipulating people? Tony had Rhodey completely at his beck and call. What if that wasn't friendship, it was deliberate and the trap had worked so well Rhodes didn't even know he'd been fooled? What if Tony was just using Gene for the Rings? What would Stark do with all the Rings if he had them? How could Gene be expected to be friends with someone who was so smart and so stupid all at once? He couldn't reconcile the boy genius and the social idiot in his head, so some of it had to be fake, and if he didn't figure out which he'd be screwed…

"Shut up," Gene whispered out loud to the nagging, pessimistic train of thought. "Shut up. That's not true. Tony wouldn't hurt me. Pepper and Jiang loved me. Ai was like my sister. You're wrong, you're lying…"

They were using him. Jiang had an in with the Tong now, he had gotten them out of China just in time for them to avoid detection or arrest. If he wanted to he could make a luxurious life for himself out of what he'd done, out of Gene. Was he really supposed to believe it was coincidence that he'd never heard from his friend again after they split ways? For all Gene knew Jiang Zhen was out there right now under an assumed name, reaping all the benefits he could off of his first well planned move. He'd always been so good at talking to people. His voice was like silk. Gene was just a convincing stepping stone, an innocent looking ploy that he could use to get Zhang interested in what the young charismatic manipulator could do. Zhang would go to him, ask him to join, and Jiang would play coy until he tricked his way into a good deal, a way out of the country or perhaps a small fortune. He was so handsome and clever, there was no telling what he could do. And no one would ever believe it because he was just a poor orphan with a single ancient relative to look after. He had nothing to lose and everything to gain, there was no way he'd just let Gene go, not when Gene was so profitable.

"Shut up!" Gene screamed, smashing his fist against the stone wall. It hurt and his skin tore open in bits, but the pain didn't silence the doubts, the uncertainty that was rising to the surface. "Shut up! You don't know anything! He wouldn't do that to me!"

Pepper's father was an FBI agent. Gene was such a perfect lead, a great way to get close to a known criminal, a member of the Tong, to regain the honor of her fallen SHIELD agent mother. She never loved him or cared about him. She used her energetic personality to throw him off guard and her quick speech patterns to confuse and disarm him. This way she could get closer and closer to him, to Zhang, but she never had to open up, only let out a steady stream of babble. She was going to leave him for dead once she had what she wanted. Gene and his step father were gateways to a good career. She didn't care about him, only what he represented, an open door into the world of law enforcement. Ever since day one she'd spent her every second trying to get him to open up and let her in on his secrets, be her friend. And why?

Because she was in league with Stark, that backstabbing, two timing monster. Stark had called in the Psychonauts on Gene. He had called in the world's finest psychics and reality warpers to rip apart his former friend. Stark wanted the Rings and Gene was the only thing standing in his way. Kill Gene, get the Rings, and then Pepper had her future career sealed and Stark was on his way to riches again. The money he could've made out of the genetic lock system on the Rings alone would be worth a large fortune. He'd been peaceful enough when they were going after the Rings together, of course, but it had all been a ruse, all been a lie, a clever little deception he couldn't stop falling for. Gene had seen it with his own eyes – Tony had been discussing plans for taking down the Mandarin with a German Psychonaut. Gene had the whole thing recorded. Concrete evidence, screamed his other voice at him angrily, that he had been betrayed and stabbed in the back.

"No." Gene shut his eyes and _remembered_, with all his might. He remembered laughing alongside Tony on that iceberg the Ring was on. He remembered talking to Pepper, sitting in a café and swapping stories. He remembered Jiang holding him after Ai died. Friends, he thought as his heartbeat spiraled out of control, he had friends. They weren't traitors. This wasn't what it looked like. His fists clenched and he tried to reign in his breathing to no avail. His sanity was slipping out of his control again. He tried to still himself. "No, not again, please not again. Please, don't do this to me."

It was too late. Nightmarish memories began replaying before his eyes. There were a thousand doubts swirling around in his head, in his heart, and he didn't want it to be true. He clutched his head, weaving cold fingers through his hair, shaking his head. No, no, he didn't want these thoughts. He didn't want this, living his life in fear of the people who loved him the most. Gritting his teeth and struggling to hold still, he opened his eyes to find the world around him didn't look like it should. Every inch of this place suddenly carried a horrible memory, a vicious incident he'd rather have forgotten. The good memories, running with Ai, confiding in Jiang, and climbing the building for the heck of it were replaced by the memory of Ai's frail body laying lifeless in the mud, the school bullies beating the crap out of another Yi student while Gene had watched, paralyzed with fear and deliberately refusing to save the other boy. Everything slammed into him like a hurricane. He was suddenly dizzy and exhausted, and when he tried to stand he simply tumbled off the ledge entirely.

The metal arms around him were unfamiliar, until he heard the voice. Tony. "Fuck," Gene said out loud, both annoyed at himself and his ex-friend. He didn't have enough mental strength to articulate actual sentences, so he settled for a swear word that applied to both of them. "What the hell are you doing here, Stark?"

"I have a better question," Tony retorted as he landed and his face plate drew back to reveal his face. "What are you doing at an abandoned school having a conversation with yourself at six in the morning? Gene, what's going on?" The Mongolian-Yi boy turned away, shuddering. "Gene… Temugin," he corrected himself aloud, "I talked to your grandfather, your mother's father. He told me a few things I think you should know."

"Like what?" the Mongolian snapped. "If this is some psychological trickery, forget it. You can't convince me to do anything because I'm the last Khan, not anymore. My step father played me like a fiddle with that one for years. Now it doesn't even matter to me, so don't even try it."

"Dissociative Identity Disorder runs in your family! And so does schizophrenia, for that matter! Temugin, your own mind has been fighting with you all this time and you never even asked us for help!" Tony threw up his hands in exasperation. "You can't get help if no one knows there's a problem. I'm a techno geek, not a mind reader. Although," he added quickly, "That _is_ how I found you, for the record."

Gene shot Tony a blank look. "Dissociative identity what?" he asked, genuine confusion on his face. "Stark, what are you talking about?"

Comprehension dawned in the Westerner's eyes. "You… Gene, you don't… I mean, I guess that the next Mandarin doesn't need to know psychology very thoroughly, but…" Tony took a deep breath. "Okay, this is awkward. Let me put it this way: do you ever feel like there's a second you? A ruthless, vicious personality that doesn't hold back like you do, that crosses lines you would never cross? Does he do things you don't want to do, make you do things you'd never do otherwise? Do you ever wake up sometimes and not know what's been going on the past few days?"

The Asian boy was staring at him like a deer caught in headlights. "Tony, shut up," he said coldly, but his voice was shaky and his eyes betrayed how his friend's words were hitting home. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"I think I do, Gene. I think there's another Gene in there and he's made your life hell. I don't think he sees it that way," Tony moved closer, slightly, slowly, as he spoke, "But all this paranoia and watching your back all the time has slowly wrecked you. And yet you're not a paranoid, nervous guy. You're pretty cool and normal. You just can't stop it when he gets in control, can you?" He reached out for Gene's hand. "Gene, you need help. This other you is dangerous. You need-"

_He's trying to trick you again. He always does. He'll get your guard down, and he'll kill you in a heartbeat. It's a clever little ruse, isn't it, giving you false hopes by swooping in to save you from a fall? So perfect, no one else would ever think to save a life just to kill it late, but Stark's a genius, he's able to outwit even the last Khan…_

Gene groaned, cradling his head in one hand. "Shut up. Please, Jianyu, just be quiet…" he whispered softly, not even realizing he was speaking out loud until Tony looked at him strangely. Gene froze. "I – I can explain – not what it looks like – I'm not _weak_, Stark!" he snarled, suddenly angry, and Tony backed up several steps on sheer instinct. "You obnoxious self righteous egotistical freak with a savior complex! You think you can dissect me like a machine? You're nothing but a traitor and a coward, a whimpering child who lost his daddy and fell to pieces! You can't trick me into surrendering the Rings to you with false pretenses of salvation and redemption – and even if you did really want to help me, what makes you think I'd surrender myself to an unstable alcoholic in the first place?"

Tony's eyes narrowed. "You're not Gene."

"No. I'm a notch above him. And I'm not fooled by you, Anthony Stark. I know that deep down you're nothing but a wide eyed idealist with no place in the real world. You're weak and soft, a spoiled Westerner who doesn't understand what it's like to have to live in reality, to see blood and violence all around you, to have death on yours hands. All you know is your soft, cushy little American life where your biggest concern is what video game to get next. You are beneath me. So get out of my way before I _make_ you get out of my way, permanently. I don't need your help and I never will." The voice carried enough blazing hatred to melt Pluto, and his eyes were devoid of all warmth. They were like snake eyes, predatory and defensive, and Tony found himself honestly intimidated. It wasn't the way Gene stood with his fists clenched and scowl fierce, it was the words he was speaking. Gene never insulted Tony's family; Gene scarcely acknowledged that people had families. It was his sore spot. Jianyu, on the other hand, was doing his best to hit Tony's weak points, to throw his past in his face. He was trying to unhinge the other boy to make him easier to defeat. Unfortunately for Jianyu, Anthony wasn't the same person he'd been last time they met.

All his life Tony had struggled with self worth, with having any kind of confidence in himself. Once he had destroyed his life and family with alcohol this issue reached new heights. For years he had lived a smiling, happy facade while inside he was filled to the brim with self hatred. He had never been able to accept that someone as smart as he was could hurt people. He had spent a lot of time avoiding facing the reality of what he'd done. So he'd tried to be like his father, and then he'd tried to self medicate with alcohol, until finally it all came crashing in in a moment of realization: his life was not over yet. Though he was not a religious man, in some strange spiritual way he believed it was his calling to save people, to help them, to stop them before they stopped themselves. Once he had realized the way he'd almost destroyed himself, it was so easy to see the self destructive tendencies in others, to have compassion for the people that the world didn't deem worthy of saving. Gene was a murderer, a liar, a thief and a criminal. He was also an orphan, an abuse survivor, a boy who had spent his entire life being picked on for being a minority and a heir to a destiny too big for any one person to grasp. His daily existence was a miserable pit of despair. Zhang had tried so hard to break Gene that Gene had broken into two people just to get through his day to day life. He had lost everything, his parents, his heritage, his family heirlooms, his home, and ultimately his future, all to a madman with a thirst for power and no humanity within him.

When all of this started, the day after Tony Stark became Iron Man, if someone had told him he'd let his father's murderer/kidnapper go, he'd have called them mad. If he'd been given the opportunity to let the man who ruined his life drop to his death the day after the accident he'd have taken it. There was a time where Tony was as blinded by guilt, hate and anger as Gene was. But the man standing before Jianyu was no longer angry. All he wanted was to stop this endless cycle of bloodshed and madness. The insults didn't hurt Tony. They only made his resolve stronger.

"Can it, Jianyu. Just because you're insecure doesn't mean the rest of the world is," Tony retorted, his faceplate falling down to cover his face again. "Now, shut up and close your eyes." He held up his hand, the Ring on it pulsing to life and glowing straight through the armor. "This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me."

Gene was about to object, but then the Ring flashed, and everything went black.


	37. Interlude At The Rhodes

**Author's Note: **I know I'm evil for making you wait another chapter until the epic battle inside the mind between Tony and Gene. I just can't help it; I sat down to write that and wrote a Rhodey chapter instead somehow. I love him, the underappreciated, overworked awesome guy that he is. Sorry! I promise next chapter will be the epic inner demon fest of angst despair and redemption. For now, please accept three thousand words of Rhodey.

And I know the shippers who read this will want to kill me, and I know that I originally started this fanfic off without the intent to do any pairings, but… Well, look at this way, technically nobody's hooked up with each other yet, so, um, logically you might be able to make a case that that doesn't count? XD

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_Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind._ - William Shakespeare

_I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes.__ – _Anais Nin, author

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Seth and James Rhodes were not, presently, talking to each other.

Normally, when siblings sit silently in each other's presence, pausing occasionally to shift uneasily, it indicates they won't like each other. The glorious war of sibling rivalry and the spats that result from being related and forced to live together were universal concepts. In their case, however, it wasn't so much hatred as it was incompatibility. They did not relate to each other. They couldn't. They were raised in separate worlds from each other, in entirely different cultures, and they would never be able to really connect because of it. At least, that was how James Rhodes, known as Rhodey to his friends, teachers and everybody but Seth, tended to view it in his head. He never voiced that thought out loud. The last thing he wanted was to set Seth off on a rant about their parents. Not that Rhodey didn't agree they were strange, or that he disagreed with Seth's criticisms towards them, but James Rhodes had been born the peacekeeper. He would never say something that would bring up a sore spot or start a conflict. That was just who he was. He had spent too many years watching his father argue with everyone to be like that. All he wanted was peace. For the most part, ever since his brother got home, there had been an awkward truce not to start any arguments in any way with each other, if only for their mother's sake.

Still, there remained the constant feeling that Seth was better than him. Or, more accurately, _blacker_ than him. Seth grew up with their grandparents. That meant he'd lived in a black neighborhood, gone to a black school, had black friends and was probably why he was such a champion of race issues. Seth was the kind of person who was so outspoken that he was forever looking for an outlet to discuss race, classism, and the problems facing American society. One of his friends had jokingly described him as a man so deep you could get lost in him. Rhodey privately agreed. His brother was like a cultural expert, a one man encyclopedia on black history, and he made the youngest Rhodes sibling feel distinctly inadequate. Seth had never missed an opportunity in the past to comment on how white Rhodey was, on how out of touch with his heritage he was, and years of that had begun to take their toll. Sometimes everything from Rhodey's music to his clothes seemed like they weren't as good as Seth's, weren't quite right. Seth Rhodes could tell someone the history of African clothing off the top of his head and spoke Wakandan, Swahili and Zulu. James Rhodes would be doing good to find Wakanda on a map.

James wasn't sure when he'd started looking at his own interests and wondering if there was something wrong with him, but his brother had a way of making him feel like a failure just by being present. Seth had fought alongside the king of Wakanda to secure the nation's borders and future as a country; he'd spent a whole year in Africa being a war director in all but name. He'd done it to help Africa because Seth was obsessed with 'the motherland' as he called it. Everyone who James knew thought Seth was good. Too intense, some people said, and way out of line for stealing technology from Stark International to do what he did, but people thought he had a good heart. People were proud of his actions in Wakanda. There was no one who was more at ease with people than Seth, who seemed to be able to make friends with every black he met on the spot. He was at home in a crowd of other black people, was never an outsider to them. James always seemed to be stuck on the outside looking in.

He was the one people patted on the shoulder and called a good boy. Like a dog, he'd think to himself sometimes, he was the well trained son. He had good grades and went to a fantastic school. Sometimes he felt like he was a trophy his parents showed off periodically when they needed to make a good impression. He wasn't anyone's friend, never fit into groups or communities like Seth did. Somehow he wasn't able to relate to anyone. He never really understood them. Admittedly, this went for white people as well. Rhodey was good if you needed to rant and be given sound logical advice. If someone wanted to joke, to have someone to bitch with about things, to do stupid teenage things with Rhodey was next to useless. He didn't understand why he was so isolated. He had never intended to be a loner, it had simply happened of its own accord. He was the good boy, not the friend. Good if you needed backup but otherwise useless. A tool.

While most people might turn to their families and friends for support when they felt used, Rhodey's family made the feelings worse inadvertently. Seth made him feel like a failure. James had a grand total of two people willing to hang out with him, both of whom were white and nerdy. He listened to techno and classical music. He used surprisingly little slang. He didn't go to a black church anymore and he didn't hang out with other people outside Tony and Pepper. He felt it even when Seth didn't comment on it: Rhodey wasn't black enough. He didn't speak like other black people in New York, he didn't dress like them, he wasn't one of them, and Seth made it clear that their mom had been raising him that way deliberately. To Roberta rap was garbage, slang was the sign of an idiot, and his current friends were lovely. She had made sure he didn't spend his all his free time on what he wanted. He forever had to study because he was Rhodey, the good son. He needed to keep his grades up, and he did, at the cost of his social life. He was his parents' achievement, something to be shown off to prove what good parents they were.

He was too 'white' to fit in with other black kids. He didn't quite understand it. There was an invisible wall between them and him. Something was wrong with him. He was a techno nerd and an overly polite loser. He didn't play sports and he liked sci-fi. These were the reasons he gave for his exclusion from their groups when his parents asked. Really it was something else, something far tangible. Maybe it was the way he spoke or how he always had to take the moral high ground. Maybe it was because he was the responsible one and the team mom to everyone he met. There was simply no one he had ever talked to who really seemed to care about him or relate to him in any way. His parents weren't friendly like other people's parents. Other black people, he observed, seemed to hug a lot, kiss a lot, talk a lot. He couldn't remember the last time his parents or brothers had touched him. He didn't understand the slang, the jokes, how anyone could be happy. If there was one thing his father was good at, it was reminding him that the world was a dark and twisted place where everything that could go wrong would. How could anyone smile in the face of the nightmarish world they lived in?

For all he thought these problems and issues, though, he was never quite able to tell anyone. He didn't talk about these sorts of things. He was James Rhodes, the one who covered for Tony all the time and let himself be walked all over by his best friends. Anyone who knew him could see plainly enough that he kept his thoughts to himself most of the time. His life consisted of non stop action ever since the whole Iron Man thing started up. His job was to cover Tony's ass and then be yelled at by Tony after calling Tony out on his stupid, hypocritical or vindictive actions. When phrased this way Rhodey had to wince at how much his friend controlled his life. There was nothing to him outside of being Tony's mom. The realization of how shallow and vapid that made him was a harsh one. He couldn't help wondering if he'd spend his whole life playing back up to everyone he met. He didn't want to be the world's tool.

None of these thoughts would ever reach Seth's ears. Rhodey didn't need to have his doubts and troubles made worse. Seth would just feed his inner demons. They awaited Tony's return from his latest hare brained scheme in stony silence. The younger brother was content to simply wait it out. He wasn't bitter about being left behind with an increasingly terrified Pepper. He wasn't even mad at being left out of the planning. He was used to it. No one ever really thought about how Rhodey would feel, since he didn't seem to qualify as a person in the eyes of most people he knew. James Rhodes was used to be left out. He'd spent his life alone for the most part, acting his way through the perfect son routine and good student mask until he got to be alone. Alone in his own head the world could not hurt him or make him feel like a failure. His parents, especially his father, made him feel like he wasn't a good enough child. His brother made him feel like he didn't measure up to some hidden standard of blackness. Tony made him feel like a bad friend for giving a shit about him. Pepper made him feel clueless compared to how social she was. At least when he was alone he wasn't trying to be good enough for all of them.

His best friend was a super hero. That meant everyone's focus was on Tony now. No one ever seemed to think of Rhodey. It was how he preferred it, left alone to self destruct away from the rest of the world. Society was a big, complicated mess he had never understood. Having someone outshine him so thoroughly meant that the pressure to be perfect was off of him more than usual lately. Everyone could worry about Tony for once. Rhodey found that, despite his frustration with being treated as a useful object, he was not eager to have people pay attention to him. He wanted to be truly alone. Perhaps that would help him sort out his life. Perhaps he just wanted a break from everything. He wasn't sure anymore what he wanted. He was fairly sure that he was selfish for thinking about his own problems so much when Tony was out there fighting a super villain. On some level he would always be guilty for whining about his life even in his head when he knew he was fortunate to have two loving parents, a roof over his head and a best friend that was a technological genius. He couldn't work up the energy to be too pissed at himself, though. Lately he was slipping more and more into an apathetic depression, a state of hopelessness punctuated by brief moments of pain and inadequacy. It was like he was fading from reality.

A fading shell of a human, Rhodey mused, did not make for a good conversationalist. He and Seth had been sitting, pacing, and waiting here for an hour. Soon Tony would call and everyone could focus on the future. Super heroes meant high pressure situations of great importance. What was happening with Iron Man right now would have ramifications for years to come. If he lost then they were all screwed and the future was uncertain at best. If he won then they could all breathe the first sigh of relief they'd had in months. Everything had been out of control, a hurricane of events, ever since Tony created the Iron Man suit. Things were either about to get worse or finally come to some kind of conclusion that might allow them all some normalcy from now on. Rhodey hoped it was the latter. He was tired of seeing his best friend almost high in high stakes battles against criminals. Whatever happened to those days where they'd eat popcorn and rewatch _The Matrix_ together for the hundredth time? Rhodey was too tired of all this drama to manage small talk. He just wanted things to be okay again for the first time in months. What he'd give for some everyday life right about now. Boring days had never looked so beautiful.

The cuts on his arms were still sore. They ached. He wanted to sleep. He knew he couldn't sleep, not out of physical pain but because worry would keep him up. Rhodey wouldn't be able to close his eyes knowing that Tony was confronting a possible psychopath with super powers halfway across the world right now. He couldn't even distract himself with video games or talking to Pepper, who was equally as worried and currently busy making sure Tony's heart recharger was ready to go when he returned. It was yet another mundane task she'd taken up to fill the silence and time. She'd also cleaned her house from top to bottom and done so for the Rhodes household too, despite Rhodey's protests it wasn't needed. When that was done she'd begun busily alphabetizing the books on the Rhodes living room shelves, cleaning the yard and reorganizing the fridge to be more efficient and easily navigated. All of these things might come across as random to someone who didn't know her. Rhodey recognized it for what it was: anxiety. When Pepper was nervous she got energized – and she was hyper as it was – and she channeled that energy into whatever she could to keep herself from exploding. He didn't judge her for it. After all, he channeled all his emotions into self injury, something he knew was a lot less productive and a lot more wrong. At least she was doing something other than lying around like an idiot. Thus far all he'd done was worry about Tony, think about how pathetic his life was, and, briefly, wonder if Pepper and Tony would get together after this was over. Good God, he hoped so. This was starting to get obnoxious.

Pepper and Tony had been playing what Rhodey referred to as love tag ever since they'd met. There were moments where they each clearly seemed to feel something for one another, seemed to care on a deep level like boyfriend and girlfriend, but neither of them said anything. They never did anything with those moments. They would just go back to acting like perfectly normal friends even as the tension between them mounted. The two of them were fondest of each other when the other wasn't present. When Pepper wasn't around Tony had lamented about his being a bad friend to her; when Tony was gone Pepper was working herself into a frenzy. Rhodey knew Roberta thought it was cute how the two teens were tip toeing the line between friends and something more. Rhodey thought, quite frankly, that it was stupid. They didn't have parents who would critique their choices into the ground and talk about keeping up standards. If they wanted to they could be happy together and no one would bug them over their choice of each other because they were both white genius nerds who had reckless streaks. If Rhodey ever tried to tell Pepper he loved her he was fairly sure everyone he knew would advise him against it. After all, most people were still scratching their heads that the two were friends at all.

Maybe, Rhodey thought, looking contemplatively at Pepper as she bounded into the kitchen to make them all lunch, it was because Pepper was so free. She was who she was. She made no apologies for that. She was bold and loud. She was everything he could never hope to be; his parents would never let him act like she acted or do what she did. Pepper wore her heart on her sleeve, she was so morally upright she reminded him of a super hero, and she never cared what anyone else thought. He was well aware when their friendship began last year that his father wouldn't like her simply because the man never liked anyone. He warned her. She didn't care. Pepper wanted to hang out with Rhodey and what everyone else thought was falling on deaf ears. She needed someone calm she could rant to, someone reasonable who could reign in her insane impulses, and he needed someone real. All around him the world seemed composed of boring, fake, plastic people who never seemed to feel anything, really feel it inside. Pepper was passionate. She was abnormal. Pepper Potts was genuine in a way he couldn't explain, and it was why he loved her so dearly. She kept him sane by being insane. In a world of dull monotone gray she was a burst of color. He couldn't imagine life without her. He loved her.

And she didn't realize it. She never had. She never _would_, because Rhodey would never say a word. He didn't need to ask her to know she didn't want him. No one had ever wanted to date him, no one had ever had a crush on him, and no one ever fell in love with him. That was just how his life worked. Some men never told women they loved them out of fear of rejection, Rhodey didn't say anything because he considered himself already rejected. Next to Tony Stark the boy genius he wasn't worth anything. Tony was a super hero whose inventions would change the world for the better. Rhodey was the best friend, the guy women never even joked about dating. There was never any hope for him and Pepper getting together, and once she met Tony he'd known beforehand it'd be all over. That was why he'd tried so hard to keep them apart, to avoid introducing them to once another. He'd wanted a few more moments of her all to himself. Now that she'd fallen for Tony and was playing the inevitable teenage games of crush tag, love tag, confession, he might as well have not even existed. Just like everyone else, she'd used him to get something.

She just didn't realize it.


	38. Rememberance And Fatalities

**Author's Note:** This long chapter was divided into two for ease of reading. Part two will be up shortly. And since a reader asked, I'd like to clarify that Shoutan will indeed make a reappearance in Pepper's life. Just not until we get through the Gene/his inner demons thing. One set of issues at a time, people.

* * *

_A single day of sub-zero temperature is not enough to create three feet of ice._ – Chinese proverb

_Just when you thought you had reached the deepest depths of horror, it suddenly got worse. How to turn off that small voice inside your head that started to whisper that you should be glad — that now, if not before, your revenge was justifiable on any conceivable moral scale?_ — Max Payne, upon finding out the truth about the murder of his family

* * *

Sasha had given Tony a brief crash course in the human psyche.

Going into someone's mind was extremely dangerous. An untrained fool could do unfathomable amounts of damage on accident. A malicious person could drive someone mad in mere minutes. Contrariwise, the mind was very good at fighting back against invasions. It was possible for a strong willed person's subconscious to chuck an unwary Psychonaut out through sheer willpower alone. Setting aside both these factors, there was the way minds were set up; the psychic landscape was a strange thing indeed. Everyone's minds had off shoots, rooms, caverns, secret places that held the most vital memories yet were the hardest to access. There were nightmares still walking in the unconscious mind, ready to rip apart anything they came across. Figments of things gone by hung in the air, see through throwbacks to days gone by.

Gene's mind was, like all human minds, a psychic landscape that represented his emotional well being. Tony's first thought was that if that was true, Gene needed therapy. The brunette found himself standing on a stone platform that was attached to the side of a mountain, one of many rock walls that formed a circle. In that circle, from here, Tony could see spread out before him all the sections of Gene's mind, fractured and divided by walls. There were four houses, each with a yard and various things attached to them. He couldn't quite see what was down there, but he knew from talking to Sasha that each part of the mind would have its own defenses. It was part of what kept people sane. What he hadn't heard from Sasha was that such a place could defy physics so thoroughly. The second Tony made his way down the stone stairs to approach one of the houses, the sky changed drastically. Everything became overcast and freezing, not to mention silent as the grave.

Tony wasn't sure what he was looking for. Memories, maybe, personal demons or nightmares – he needed something. He needed something to go off of, a starting point. His feet slid slightly on the slick, frosted cobblestones that covered the ground. The house in front of him was a pristine Chinese mansion, epic and sprawling but devoid of life or joy. All the luxury in the world couldn't hide the horrors that had occurred here. See through figments, apparitions of the Tong, hung in the air even now, still haunting this place. For somewhere within there was a scream that sounded like a child's; Tony moved forward automatically, mind racing. He was sure that that voice was a young Temugin. Inside, the house was all shades of gray, black and cool purples, a suffocating den of darkness where memories still hung in the air in tangible clouds. Tony fell to the wooden floors in shock as memories that were not his own flooded into his mind, alongside all the horror they contained.

_They had burned the body down to a charred, black mound of flesh, ash and bones. The stench was unlike anything Temugin had ever smelled, so sharp and unique he was sure it would never leave him. He began to shake, wanting to scream but not having the voice for it. No scream, no sound, could ever be loud enough to articulate what he felt when he saw the crispy black skin fall to the floor in chunks. He shook. He fell down. He could not stand. Then, suddenly, it all hit him hard and he began to scream with all his might, backing away on all fours, clutching his eyes, trying to block out the fate of the traitor who didn't deserve this, nobody did…_

Suddenly Tony was back in his own awareness again, and slowly he sat up, looking around. The phantom image of the body was still in the corner of the living room. Zhang had wanted to see the body to confirm that it was thoroughly destroyed. Tony knew this because Gene knew it and he was in Gene's mind now, where memories that could never fade away still lay in waiting behind every corner. Shuddering, he made his way to the hallway again, moving down it slowly, eyes peeled for movement of any kind. As he walked by one room he heard quiet gasping. It was like sobbing, just quieter, different, more pained. Steeling himself for what he might find, he pushed open the door and froze. For a moment he couldn't even comprehend what he was seeing. When he did, he felt sick and even though he knew his astral projection couldn't throw up, he wanted to.

"_Just one more time, Temugin," a voice murmured, filled with all kinds of tones that set the boy on edge, "And I'll get you out of here. Just be good and you'll never have to see Zhang again…" It was a lie, and Temugin knew it, but he knew that if he tried to fight back Guiren would just tell Zhang that Temugin had been trying to bargain his way out of here. He was trapped and he couldn't even use the Mandarin's power to fight this off. He shut his eyes so tightly they hurt, clenching his fists, trying not to think about what was happening as hot tears brewed behind his topaz eyes. Hands were on his pants, pulling them down and he didn't want to even think about what was going to happen next, nor did he want to cry because he was almost eight and too old for that. Still, he couldn't help the gasps of disgust and the soft sobs that welled up. Rough lips were on his, then, and he wanted to die…_

Tony was eternally glad that an hour inside the mental world was only a few seconds outside it, because he needed a moment. Make that several moments. Breathing deep, he sat down and put his head in his hands. Oh, God, he had never been so grossed out in his life. After that, though, white hot fury suddenly coursed through him. Zhang should have known, should have stopped it, should have treated his step son better. If Tony ever became a parent he wouldn't let this go on, would protect the child with all his power and make sure that they knew they could come to him with anything. He couldn't fathom anyone in the Tong not knowing about it when their base of operations was a single home, which meant that Zhang had just not cared enough to stop it. He had _let_ this happen. Tony wanted to strangle him, or better yet throw him in an American prison where people involved in child abuse tended to be murdered regularly while the guards were mysteriously too busy to intervene. Punching the wall in frustration, the brunette took several deep breaths to calm himself. He could and _would_ find Zhang after all this was over and make the man pay for his crimes. Right now he had to focus on repairing Gene's mind.

The damage was pretty bad at a glance. Mind weren't meant to be fractured into four sections so cleanly, and the whole place was clogged with suppressed memories and emotion. Sasha had forewarned Tony that anger often manifested as gushes of red energy and tended to come out of nowhere, but there was enough in here to power a small city. There were whole rooms that were bright red and Gene's angry voice screamed out for a reason why things were like this. It was more than a little disturbing to hear Temugin's disembodied, bitter voice swear revenge for everything that had happened. Feeling distinctly uneasy, Tony went from room to room, still not sure what he was looking for. At this point he thought it was best just to assess the damage. There were old visions of days gone by still haunting the house. Tong warriors came and went, passing right through Tony without a second glance, while voices without any bodies had conversations in Chinese that the white boy understood simply because he was in Gene's head. He heard a child's shriek and turned instinctively, raising his eyebrows when the voice wasn't Gene's, but a girl's.

"_I don't want to marry Temugin! Where's my mother? You said she was here – where is she? Where is my mother?" The ten year old was cut off with a quick slap to the cheek. One of the woman's rings had cut the girl's cheek. Her eyes were narrow, almond shaped and spirited. Tony knew then that she would not be bent to her caretaker's will. He could see it in her face. "You can't make me do it," she said defiantly, voice firm in spite of the glower of her caretaker. "You can't make me do anything I don't want to do! Go ahead and kill me, I don't care, I won't do it!"_

"_Hold your tongue, Dandan, you wicked child," the woman snapped. "You are the last of the Khan women and you will uphold your family's honor with this."_

_Dandan had eyes that were the color of smoky rubies, and they blazed with fury and stubbornness. There was something in her that would not be broken. She drew herself up to her full height. Her hands were broken, Tony realized, wrapped in bloody bandages and shaking in pain. They had broken them to keep the last female Khan from ever being able to use the Rings, but they hadn't managed to destroy her. Driving this home, Dandan spat on the woman's feet, glowering darkly. Her face was heart shaped, her nose thin and her chin held up in defiance of everything they were trying to do to her. Temugin thought she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, second only to his own mother, her black hair up in two buns that managed to look, to his imagination, like a crown. She was in a qipao and she stood tall like royalty, her pale, thin body obviously malnourished even though she stood her ground proudly. Something about her sparked the long dormant warrior in him, the part of their Khan heritage that didn't allow them to be victims. She met his eyes and her crimson gaze begged him not to give in. _Hold on,_ she seemed to be saying silently, _don't back down.

"_I don't give a damn about honor!" she yelled, her voice clear and strong. Temugin was entranced. He would never dare to be defiant like this, never speak those words to his elders when he knew well that they could hurt him viciously if he did so. Dandan's voice got louder with each sentence. "You claim you want to be honorable, but you're a filthy whore and a thief. You're rotten deep down and no amount of honor will ever make you into one tenth the woman my mother is!" She spat on the woman again, and when she was struck, she just kept smirking, gazing into the woman's eyes with keen insight. "You're trash," she informed the older woman coldly, and to Temugin's shock she actually seemed to be unnerving her captor. "And nobody in this whole world loves you or would care if you died."_

_She had struck a nerve, and struck it hard. The Tong woman began to cry, stunned tears of hatred and denial, as she grabbed the thin girl by her hair and began to beat her. But no amount of blows could change the fact that she'd been bested; the child had won. Her total and utter sincerity when she spoke had done something to the Tong woman that could not be undone. Dandan twisted in the woman's grip and kicked her hard in the stomach, hard enough to knock her over. That was the golden opportunity that the girl had been waiting for. She seized the vase off the room's table and brought it down on the woman's head with such force that it shattered. Grabbing ahold of one of the shards, she tackled the woman and began stabbing her with such fervor that she lost the glass inside the body. Despite her hands being broken and bandaged, she clamored to her feet and began jumping on top of the woman's stomach, before spotting an ornamental knife on the wall._

"_You won't hurt Temugin, you won't hurt anyone else, you trash!" she snarled, rounding the shaking and screaming form of her tormentor's body with fire burning in her eyes. "You murderer! You killed my mother, didn't you? Well, you won't ever kill anyone again!" And she drove the knife down into the woman's throat, digging at it desperately, trying to end the life of the monster who had tried so hard to destroy her. "I won't let you hurt anyone else! I won't! I won't!" Dandan was screaming incoherently, her rage blinding her to the horror and awe on Temugin's face as he watched, paralyzed by shock and fear. "I won't let you hurt my cousin!"_

_Cousin. His mother had had a sister, Temugin remembered suddenly, and that meant Dandan was… He reached out to stop her, grabbing her arms and getting the woman's blood on his own hands. "Stop it! Once they find out they'll kill you! What have you done?" the eight year old asked, shaking in terror as he heard the footsteps of the Tong approaching. "What have you done?"_

"_I fought back!" Dandan said proudly, grasping his hands tightly. "Listen to me, Temugin. It is better to die free than live enslaved. My mother taught me that. I am no one's pawn, not even the Mandarin's, and neither are you. You're a fighter." The Tong burst into the room and seized her by the arms, lifting her off her feet. "Remember that!" She shouted as they pulled her away. "You're a fighter! You're a fighter!"_

_And deep down, some part of him said yes, yes he was._

Tony leaned against the wall, looking at the figment of the woman's body, a pale hologram leftover from the event itself inside Temugin's mind. He looked at the blood and at the knife. First Sarantuyaa then Dandan's mother – the Khan women were warriors. Dandan, too, despite being a child, had been so brave Tony felt himself awed by it. In the face of death, torture, murder and crime she should have bowed down, should have let them use her for her own safety. But instead she had spat in the face of the Tong's world of depravity, quite literally. She was no one's toy to be used. She was not a tool. He shook his head in shock, staring down at the ghost of her handiwork. And people called him a hero. He wouldn't have been brave enough to do this, not at her age. To murder to save a life was something only adults were usually capable of. Then again, usually adults were the only ones who had to make that choice. Dandan would've made a fantastic Mandarin; what had happened to her, anyway?

Likely she was still held by the Tong or – and Tony considered this to be more likely – she had gotten herself killed. She struck him as the kind of person who would raise so much hell that even a dedicated captor wouldn't want to keep her for long. Eventually the Tong would have to cut their losses and kill her. If she could be taken down, that was; a child who could take down a grown mobster with a vase might be able to fight her way out of the Tong altogether. Something about that was distinctly good; there was a part of him that desperately wanted to believe that some Khan, somewhere had escaped all this. He didn't want to think that this world had engulfed the entire family. This was a world far removed from the domestic bliss of rural China, a place set apart from the normality and safety of being an average poor person. The name Khan came with a hefty price tag, one that no one seemed to be able to escape from. Tony kept going, looking for the memories that had haunted Gene, the individual incidents that still kept him awake. He needed to understand. Without understanding, he could never hope to help.

_There was something lurking inside him now. Something inside him was brewing, stirring, something formed of memories and emotions. Pain and suffering incarnate took form within him. He remembered the blood. He remembered his mother, his father, and their pain. He remembered Dandan telling him not to give up, give in, to what they wanted from the Khan children. They wanted them to be obedient sheep that did as they were told. They wanted blind followers who could be manipulated and used. Instead Dandan had been a snake in the form of a worm, helpless looking but violent, a nightmare that couldn't be stopped. And she had unlocked something inside him, something that had no name that had lurked in his mind, hiding. Now it was out, but he wasn't sure what it was._

"The first one," a voice said behind Tony, "Was Guiren. They never did figure that one out."

Tony turned, and even though he wasn't in a dimension where he needed to breathe, his breath caught in his throat. "Gene?" His eyes narrowed. "No, wait, that's not possible…"

"It's Jianyu, Stark." The Chinese boy took Tony by the arm. "Come with me. There's something you need to see."

_He had seen it. He'd seen Guiren looking at her like he did Gene, with that predatory gleam, and she was only three. No, no. He wasn't going to let that happen. He was a fighter. He was a Khan. He was the Mandarin, he had noble blood in him, and he could make this stop before it started. He wasn't going to let anyone else be hurt by that monster. They wouldn't kill him because he was Khan Temugin, too valuable to die. Rage was coursing through him, white hot and yet cold, so cold that it was crystal clear. Everything was clear. There was no sign anything was wrong as he calmly strolled up to the evil man, his face that of an innocent child, and the letter opener swiped from the library room clutched behind his back. The idiot was standing by the well, drawing up water for something. No one saw it…_

Tony abruptly pulled away from the memory, staggering slightly. Jianyu didn't catch him, watching with bored disinterest. His face was like a statue's, devoid of any emotion whatsoever. He simply observed the human's reactions. Of course, that was normal. His job was to be the hardcore, vicious personality. He didn't need to be kind or caring, so he wasn't. He was just a persona, not a person. Jianyu was different from Gene, physically. His eyes were painted over, a shade of gold closer to yellow than to Gene's true topaz-brown, and he had more muscles. He was in clothes splattered with blood, some recent and some long fading. Not real, Tony reminded himself as he shuddered under the sociopath's gaze, this was not a real person, just Gene's shield. And if Jianyu tried anything then Tony would just wake up in his own body, alive and well.

So why, then, was Tony still terrified?


	39. Salvation In Iron

_The beauty of life is, while we cannot undo what is done, we can see it, understand it, learn from it and change so that every new moment is spent not in regret, guilt, fear or anger but in wisdom, understanding and love.__ –_ Jennifer Edwards

_For what I've done, I'll start again. And whatever pain may come, today this ends, forgiving what I've done. I'll face myself, to cross out what I've become, and face myself, forgiving what I've done…_ - Linkin Park, What I've Done

* * *

"Stop staring at me like a deer caught in headlights, Stark. It's not like this is the first time you've seen me." Jianyu gave him a thoughtful look. "You even saw my take over of Gene mid-conversation, back when you were begging for alcohol."

"I knew it," Tony muttered before he could help himself. Then he paused, thinking. "So why are you here? You know I want to get rid of you and make Gene sane again, right?"

"You know that's impossible, right?" Jianyu replied, deadpan. "He'd be dead without me. He can't function minus me. He'll… Stark, you need to look through the other houses before you go messing with the wiring up here. Trust me when I say it's complicated. I'd love to just fade out of existence, but Gene needs me and I don't want him to die. I couldn't give less of a shit about you or the others. I think you're all dumbasses to be quite honest, and you and Pepper are way too trusting and it'll get you shot one day – but I love Gene."

"That… makes sense," Tony admitted after a moment. "You're his survival instinct. This is sort of your job. It's your prime directive. And I'm guessing removing you by force would do more harm than good even if I could manage it." He looked towards the building's exit. "Just tell me it doesn't get worse in the next houses."

"Why would you want me to lie to you, Stark?" Jianyu smirked, then frowned darkly as he led the way to the next house. It was the school they were so close to in the outside world. "Seriously, though, tread carefully. This place isn't as perfect as they'd have you believe."

"_Are you my room mate?" Temugin demanded, channeling more Jianyu than he'd meant to._

_The boy in front of him nodded, his hair falling in his face. It was brown even at the roots, the color of dark chocolate, and his eyes were cool toned light brown, with flecks of beige by the pupils. He had a heart shaped face and long eye lashes. He looked non-threatening and normal. He looked innocent. Jianyu growled, but Temugin was the more dominant one. He smiled coolly, and reached out to shake the boy's hand…_

Tony took a few seconds to process the memory fragment. He hadn't known Gene had gone to a boarding school. All alone, isolated from Zhang – this was both a good thing and a bad one. On the one hand, any time spent away from Zhang was good. The man was toxic, destroying everyone he came into contact with. He was the source of all the misery and pain Temugin had gone through. But racism was everywhere and Gene was a vulnerable double minority alone without any family or friends to back him up. There wasn't any choice in the matter. Gene was forced into yet another new world he didn't understand just because Zhang didn't want to take care of him. Tony slowly made his way through the building. Ghosts of classmates past still lingered in the hallways, talking, whispering, their words still echoing through Gene's mind.

"_Yi trash," one girl sneered derisively. "Look at him, look at his eyes. He's so disgusting…"_

_A tall boy with a group of friends who were more like followers whispered loudly enough for the others to hear, "I heard he has family in Mongolia. I heard they're beggars. You know it's true because I heard it from Shuichon."_

"_Hey Yi boy, why don't you play a flute for me?" an upper classmen yelled, and the cafeteria burst into laughter as Gene's face reddened._

"In case that last stereotype doesn't make sense to you, Stark," Jianyu drawled, eyes glinting maliciously with barely suppressed rage, "Yi people are often performers. They can't get jobs elsewhere, so they play flutes and dance for money. Kind of like Gypsies, which the world's done such a _fine_ job of treating well."

"Skin colors change, racism is universal," Tony quoted. Jianyu gave him an odd look. "Seth said it. Sometimes the pessimist has a point. So… is the whole place just filled with this?"

"Yes. Years and years and _years_ of moments like this. Names. Laughter. A bully who tried to hurt him until I took over and the jackass learned the hard way not to mess with a Khan." Jianyu's eyes narrowed and his fists clenched in anger. "A bunch of racist pigs who beat up a Yi girl who did better than them on tests. This place is a nightmare, Stark. Every place Gene goes is a den of thieves and liars, the sons of Tong and murderers who can't be trusted for a minute. The one thing I learned here was that even the most innocent, the angelic little emperors, the children – they are monsters. They are murderers. And they will kill you if you let your guard down for a second."

Moving through the halls, Tony found it impossible to block out the words. The whispers and sneers were everywhere. Eyes lingered on Temugin wherever he went. Conversations stopped entirely when he was present. People backed away from him, sometimes afraid, sometimes disgusted, sometimes mocking, but they were ever present. There wasn't a place where he wasn't always the center of attention. He was always on edge, always ready to be attacked and hurt, always ready to let that sudden bravery that was the beginnings of Jianyu's personality take over him. Every hallway, every closet held danger. And the people he wanted most to be accepted by, the other Yi children, didn't want anything to do with him. They considered him a Mongolian half-breed. They didn't even answer when he called for help or when he said hello to them. They spoke in Yi and insulted him, thinking he didn't understand when really he'd spent his whole summer preparing, relearning his father's mother tongue in the hope that he could make a real friend.

"_I'm not one of them and I'll never be!" Temugin burst out, punching the wooden frame of his bed. His fist bounced off the edge and the top of his hand was skinned, but he kept repeating the motion with both hands, furious tears working their way down his cheeks. "There's nowhere I belong! I hate my life! I hate being Yi! I hate _me_!"_

"_Stop it!" Jiang screamed, and he pinned the smaller boy's hand to the bed, holding him down with all his weight. "Stop it, Temugin, please stop it-"_

"_Why should I? It's true! I shouldn't be alive, no one loves me-"_

"_I do."_

"_-and everyone always leaves me," Temugin stopped abruptly, mid-rant. "What did you just say?"_

"_You…" Jiang paused, his hands still entwined with his friend's. "If you were a girl, I'd marry you. I'd like to be with you forever, so maybe you wouldn't be so alone, and maybe you'd be happy. I… Temugin, even if those other boys don't want you, I do. I think you're very special. You're so passionate and alive. Like a warrior. One day you're going to be famous and I want to be your secretary or your driver or something so we can talk and be friends forever." He released his grip on the Mongolian-Yi boy, pulling away slowly. "I know my Zeng Po is going to die one day, and I'm going to be very rich. So I don't need a job. I just need – I _want_ – to have a friend. You."_

"_Don't say that," Temugin whispered, wincing. He sat up and drew his knees to his chest. "Don't even think it."_

_Jiang looked at him, clearly confused. "Why not?"_

"_Everyone who loves me dies. And I can't lose you, too. So, please, Jiang, don't ever say that again. Please."_

It was at this point Tony actually felt himself beginning to near tears. "For the love of God," he breathed, looking at Jianyu. "Please don't tell me that he died too."

"He didn't, Stark. As far as Gene and I know he stayed in school until the school closed. Past that… well, we're not sure, but nothing bad happened to him." Jianyu cried out, suddenly, mid thought. He was on his knees before Tony could blink. "No – no, Gene, don't do it…"

"What's happening?" the white boy questioned, eyes going wide as the world around them flickered and dimmed.

"Gene's – ours – the body's shutting down," Jianyu choked out. "He's killing us, himself, he's – it's suicide-" He began to shake violently, his body spasming abruptly. "Stark – other houses are decoys – basement, get to the basement."

He didn't have to be told twice. Gene's mind was literally falling apart. He could get a witty quip in later. Without a second glance behind him he ran through the memories and hallways filled with hallucinations and daydreams until his reached the stairs. He yanked open the heavy doors and plunged in without hesitation.

And then everything went black.

* * *

Gene was somewhere dark.

There was nothing. No sound, no voices, no doubts and pains. There was only silence and a cold that seeped into his bones. He lay there without moving as his thoughts slowly began to quiet. There was something trying to break through, a crack of light in the dark, but he didn't move towards the light. He had no desire to be saved. There was not one part of him that wanted to go back to that world where everything was painful and no one could be trusted. The world outside was a nightmarish place full of demons and monsters masquerading as ordinary people. And the few that weren't, the few people he really loved, either died or abandoned him.

He let the darkness overtake him. It was numb and chilling, extinguishing all doubts and fears. There was only emptiness left. That was all Gene had ever had in the end. He was hollow. Broken. Somehow he'd lost his way, had turned into a monster himself. He wasn't fit to carry the title of Mandarin. He wasn't fit to be the last Khan. He wasn't fit to live. So he let the void overtake him; it embraced him without hesitation and Temugin fell into that part of the mind where despair and apathy rule supreme. In his sanctuary of nothingness there was only isolation. In the end, that was what his mind supplied as its personal Heaven: a prison cell, because Gene was dangerous, a failure and unstable, none of which went well together. Ice began to build around him. And something deep inside him broke, the same thing that had kept him going for so long: his pride.

Stark was the true bearer of the Rings. Gene was just a fool with delusions of grandeur. He was never meant to be anything more than destiny's way of showing the true Mandarin where to go. Temugin was nothing more than an insolent dolt. Dandan was wrong. He wasn't a fighter. He was no warrior. He was a disgrace to everything that the Khan family had stood for. Gene was little more than a fool with a flamethrower at the end of the day. All he'd done was ruin lives and destroy futures. He let the ice immobilize him. He wanted to be so engulfed he could never escape to do harm again. All those people and all the blood that was on his hands wasn't worth it. The things he'd done were not justified, or necessary, or noble. He was a monster. He was less than human. He wasn't angry at Zhang anymore. He wasn't even angry at himself. He was just disappointed, disgusted, tired of who he was and everything was over. There was no way to make it right. He'd be doing the world a favor if he just stopped existing altogether.

He could really use a beer right now. He'd always liked it, after he didn't have to worry about his step father coming after him, to get drunk. When he was drunk he felt whole and warm and giddy. He recalled Jiang offering him his first stolen beer as a peace offering for the truth or dare kissing incident. He had no idea what he'd unleashed in Gene. He would never know because Gene wasn't going to let down another person in his life. He was going to do what he should've done a long time ago and end it forever. Not out of depression, but out of mercy, he was going to stop himself from hurting anyone ever again. Gene was going to stop Jianyu from ever hurting anyone in his name and in the name of the Mandarin. Willfully, deliberately, he found his inner center, and struck.

Temugin Khan's body stopped breathing.

The light doubled, cracking spider web patterns in his dark dome, but he didn't move. It was over. He'd lost. Stark had six of the Rings. If he'd taken the time to look through Gene's mind he'd find his father and everything would be as it should. In the end Gene wasn't really necessary. He was a burden on the world. Everything he did turned out all wrong. He was toxic. He was contaminated. Maybe once he'd been a good person, someone who other people could love and look up to, but now he was just a sick and twisted shell of a human being. He was dangerous and unpredictable. He was worthless. As his will to exist died out he could feel his senses begin to shut down. Everything was numb and silent as the grave. He was in his tomb and awaiting a visit from the angel of death, knowing full well that there was a very special place in Hell for him if it did truly exist.

"Gene!" The light burst forth, glistening off of his icy bed, where he lay impaled and broken surrounded by shards of ice sharper than knives. "Gene, is this…"

The mind only created what he wanted. This was it. The blood glowed in the light of Stark's entrance, the red and the white cloudy crystal spires vivid in the void. Darkness swirled tangible and cold around the base of the slab Gene was lying on. He did not move to free himself. He let the ice continue to morph and grow around him as his heartbeat, the only sound in the room, grew fainter and fainter. His tears had frozen into streaks of ice going down his cheeks. And in the center of his mind's eye, way deep down in his spirit, he was a bleeding and broken hearted six year old. Tony stood horror-struck as he processed what he was seeing. For a moment Gene thought the man would turn and leave while he could still get out. Instead his expression softened into a blue eyed version of Howard Stark's compassionate face.

"Oh, Gene." Tony moved closer, placing his hands on the boy's shoulders. "You don't deserve to die."

_You put out a hit on me. Psychonauts. _Gene's expression didn't change, even slightly, as he thought it. _Smart move. We both know what I really am._

"And what's that?"

_You said it yourself. I'm a monster._

"I was drunk and stupid. I didn't mean it. And that's not what you are. Look, Gene, I'm going to take a page from Rhodey's book and just tell you what I feel. I don't hate you. I don't want you to die. I don't even have a grudge against you for all this. I love you like my brother and I know what you really are, deep down in your heart. You're just a human being that snapped under pressure. We all do. But the circumstances of one's life are irrelevant, it's what you do with your life that determines who you are. And I have proof."

_What's that? Name one person who's murdered like me and done anything good, Stark._

"Me. I killed my mother, Gene. I took a knife and I ripped her apart because I was a selfish temperamental short sighted over reacting idiot. I'm also Iron Man. I'm a good friend, or at least I try. I've saved the world. I know that I can never, ever justify what I did. All I can do is rise above. That's why I'm not giving up on you. I flew across the world to save a life that's truly worth saving because I know nothing makes a man irredeemable. My father taught me that."

…_Tony, I'm scared. I don't want to hurt people anymore. I can't trust my own mind. I'm so scared and I'm so sorry._

"I know," Tony whispered, gently touching the cheek of the six year old boy in front of him. "I know it's scary and it's not easy. But it gets easier. You just have to let me help you, let someone help you. Please, Gene, don't give up, not when it's plain to see you could be the greatest superhero in the world. You just can't do it on your own. Neither can I. That's why friends exist. That's why I'm here. Please, Gene, breathe. I promise when you wake up I'll still be here and no matter what, I'll never abandon you. Pepper will never abandon you. You are not alone. **Breathe.**"

And he did.


	40. Aftermath

**Author's Note:** Dear Mulberry, I have to say that your review for chapter 37 sums up everything I don't get about fandom. Murder, matricide, alcohol use, split personalities, suicide attempts, implied rape in a flashback, hints of racism and outright drug usage didn't faze you… but Rhodey being in love with Pepper and deliberately not acting on it because he wants her to be happy disgusts you. It is official: I do not understand my fans. I really don't. (God help us all when Shoutan, Jagvi and Luksa start getting more of the spotlight in future chapters. I can hear the hatemail now.)

Also, foreshadowing exists in this chapter in a way that isn't utterly ham-handed. I feel proud.

* * *

…_But didn't realize instead of setting it free I took what I hated and made it a part of me.  
And now you've become a part of me, you'll always be right here. You've become a part of me, you'll always be my fear. I can't separate myself from what I've done. Giving up a part of me, I've let myself become you._ – Linkin Park, Figure 09

_Love doesn't lead to the dark side. Passion can lead to rage and fear, and can be controlled, but passion is not the same thing as love. Controlling your passions while being in love, that's what they should teach you to beware, but love itself will save you, not condemn you._ - **Jolee Bindo**, Knights Of The Old Republic

* * *

Temugin was lost in a memory.

He remembered his father holding him during a thunderstorm that was so loud it shook the house. The little boy had buried his face in the crook of his father's neck and shut his eyes tight. He couldn't shut out the sound, but he could hear his father's heart beating. He could smell the outdoors and the earth whenever his father held him. If he tried he could pick out all the scents, of noodles, spices, herbs and dyes, those magical things his father knew. His father knew everything. He could make clothes any color with plants and water. He could make noodles out of grass. He was all knowing and all powerful in the mind of the small child; after all, Aung knew three languages. That meant he was a genius. His father was never wrong. So long as they were together nothing bad could happen to him. In his father's arms Temugin felt safe and protected. His father was a perfect man. He would never let anything bad happen to his son.

He remembered his mother, with her pale skin and beautiful smile. She was a young mother, too young according to all the people from the city, but they didn't know how she was. She was patient even when others would be screaming in frustration. She was soft spoken and gentle, her touch always light. She knew legends and stories that no one else did. He could listen to her for hours as she painted vivid scenes with her words. His favorite story was how she and his father had met, at a marketplace on a busy day. They hadn't even said anything to each other yet they knew, they _knew_ like the way they knew the sun would rise and set and they knew like they knew water was wet that they had to be together. It was like being struck by lightning, she told her son. And he wished that he had someone like that who he could be friends with like his parents were. They could practically read each other's minds. He hoped one day he would meet a girl like his mother. She had a smile that lit up the room and wasn't grossed out by anything, ever.

He remembered Jiang, the loneliest boy he'd ever known. Jiang had no parents, or grandparents, only a great grandmother. She was the one taking caring of him by herself in a China she no longer understood or was a part of. She taught him the Tao, and how to keep himself calm, and this was the way he survived. One day she would die and leave the boy wealthy in money but bankrupted emotionally. He told Temugin once that he lived every day dreading the phone call saying she was dead. All the other boy could do was take his hand and sit with him in silence. Perhaps it wasn't entirely appropriate or normal, this relationship he had with Jiang. There were nights where they'd sleep in the same bed, clutching each other as if they might wake up abandoned and alone otherwise. But in the end it didn't matter if other people would have disapproved. Other people had family. They had friends. When their elders died they had someone to lean on. Temugin and Jiang had no one except for each other, brothers in a shared suffering of loneliness.

He remembered the first time he stood on American soil and felt truly alone. It was a sick feeling, like being dropped into the ocean without a life raft. In a place with letters and languages he didn't understand and people who wore gaudy clothes he stood lost in the airport, knowing he was screwed. His English was atrocious and he felt too self conscious to open his mouth and say anything. He'd make a fool out of himself. Everyone was already watching him, or at least it seemed that way as he hesitantly made his way through the crowd. Zhang would be furious if he realized Temugin was lost, but he'd kill him if he deliberately ran away from him. He had to find him or – he didn't want to finish that thought. It made his stomach churn. He looked into the faces of passing adults with what he hoped was a good 'tough guy' scowl and prayed no one noticed his knees were shaking.

He remembered Pepper, who was alive in a way Temugin had never been. She was wild, untamed, outgoing and bold. He had none of the courage necessary to be like her, so unashamedly real and emotional. Pepper wore her heart on her sleeve. She was loud. She was everything he would've gotten into deep trouble for. In a way he admired her. She was part of a world where she was congratulated on being unique instead of punished for it. Sometimes he wondered if maybe she disliked him initially because she could see through him so easily. Pepper had a knack for seeing people's real intentions lurking beneath the surface; that was why she was such good friends with Rhodey. Rhodes didn't have ulterior motives. Jianyu, underneath the surface of Gene, _did_. Maybe some part of her had sensed it, had known all along that something was wrong. Rhodes had told him once that Pepper's grandmother was a founding member of the Psychonauts, and Gene suspected some of that same power was in Patricia Potts.

He remembered Rhodey and the Rhodes clan, although he'd rather not. Roberta was fiery and convicted and righteous. She reminded him of his parents. Seeing her was like having a knife twisted into his chest. She brought back memories of the strength and morals his parents had held to steadfastly – and she thus made him feel like a failure by reminding him with her presence of all the things he'd done. Worse yet was Rhodey himself, whose eyes had a way of making Gene feel like he was being criticized even when the boy was silent. There was something lurking beneath Rhodes' surface, and it wasn't a split personality, it was a freakishly accurate sixth sense. James Rhodes knew when people were bad and when they were good. And he had looked physically ill just looking at a picture of Zhang. As far as Gene was concerned the man might as well have passed a psychic detection test with flying colors. That scared him. No one as serious and solemn as Rhodey should know what lurked in the mad mind of Temugin Khan. Tony and Pepper might forgive him, but they didn't fully understand the depths of Jianyu's cruelty. Rhodey could sense the second personality from a distance. He was probably sitting somewhere saying he'd known it all along, and that pissed Gene off because Rhodey was right far more often than a person ought to be. He probably got that from his mother, who was scarily smart.

He remembered Tony. Tony was smart and he was, once, very angry. He had carried a dark passenger inside him like Gene did, had kept something the others could never know locked up inside him. The haunting guilt, the lingering pain, the same images playing over and over in their minds. They were far too similar underneath the very different attitudes. The main difference was that Stark had friends and family to pull him out of the darkness. Gene had stayed in his own insanity for far too long, had given it a name and given into it far too often until finally he awoke one day to find himself a monster just as bad as Zhang. He was a murdered and a thief, a coward and a liar. And Tony could have struck him down and the world would have done nothing but applaud that decision. Instead he had saved him. There was ice and pain and overwhelming despair, and then Tony has broken through to him and there was light and warmth.

Warm. Gene was warm now. He could hear birds chirping. Somewhere there was a voice with a German accent saying that the second personality was gone but they'd have to keep Gene here for a few weeks for observation. And somewhere beyond that there was a voice replying softly that he understood. There was no doubt who it was. The voice was familiar and, as always, unbearably kind. Soft, articulate, compassionate, and gentle as a lamb. Howard Stark.

He remembered Howard Stark.

He remembered drunkenly sobbing out his life story. He remembered Jianyu ranting and snarling about how he needed no one. He recalled talking at great length to a man who only watched him with those eyes, those damned eyes that never held hatred like they should have. He remembered Jianyu lying to him, telling him his son was dead and laughing cruelly. He remembered struggling for control of himself and losing it time and time again. Temugin was a lost boy crying out for his mommy and daddy, Jianyu was a murderer and Gene was stuck somewhere in the middle of the mess growing confused and uncertain. He could not trust his own mind so he'd taken it out on Howard, twisting every kind word the man spoke into a conspiracy or a trick, every gesture of friendship into a trap until he could stand the man's presence no longer. Some days he popped in, threw food at the man (sometimes literally) and left. Once, however, Gene took his mind back by force. He screamed at Jianyu to leave him alone, to stop telling him everyone was against him because Howard was different. When he'd managed to get ahold of himself, Gene had turned away, ashamed. There were no words for this, no apologies for what Jianyu had done to Howard. Gene opened his eyes and saw the familiar smile above him, undeserved and ever present.

"How are you feeling?" Howard asked softly, gently touching the boy's head to feel for a fever. "You've been out for thirty six hours. You had us all worried, Temugin."

Hearing Howard Stark, patron saint of kindness, use that name for him was like being shot through the heart. Gene winced, sitting up slowly. "I'm fine. Where's Tony?"

"Asleep. He and I have been… talking."

"About his drinking?" Gene asked, and then it dawned on him. "Oh shit, I didn't tell you about the… oh, God, how pissed are you at me right now?"

"Watch your language," the man sighed. "To answer the question, though, I'm not. There was no way to tell me Tony tried to kill himself without hurting me, and you didn't want to hurt me. Jianyu did, but you're a better man than that."

Memories of what he'd done made Gene shudder violently. Jianyu. Those nights alone in the cell. "I – I – _Howard, _I'm so sorry – I – the knife and – and the – oh my God, what have I _done_?!"

"It wasn't you. It was him," Howard said softly, in a voice one might use to soothe a frightened animal. "You can't be held responsible for what he did."

"He's _me_," Gene snapped, feeling irrationally angry. Couldn't Howard ever just snap at someone instead of sitting there acting as if everything was fine? "He's the real me. I'm a monster and we both know it. How can you ever forgive me for this? Why did I ever agree to let Tony save me, I can't deal with this, I can't, I can't believe I…"

Howard took Gene's hand. "It's alright. Look at me, Temugin. We're going to get you through this. I know it's hard," he whispered, his eyes locked with the Asian boy's. "It's hard to accept and understand for someone like you. Mercy's a foreign concept to the Tong. But I'm not mad at you. I don't hate you. And I promise you're going to be alright. I know people who can help you. Just don't have a panic attack. It's okay. It's over now. I'm here."

"You want me to leave so you two can make out?" Tony's snarky voice chimed in as he opened the door. Gene shot him a death glare and Howard gave him a 'that's not funny' look. "Oh, come on, like you two are even half this witty at six A.M.?" He tossed Gene something. It was a donut. "Eat. You look like shit even by my family's standards, and given I'm from a family of inventors that's _saying_ something."

"Tony! Language!" His father snapped, looking stunned. "I'm sure Roberta doesn't let you talk like that in her house."

Gene smirked faintly. "Given the lecture she gave Rhodey over using the n-word, I'm guessing Tony's just learned to avoid using certain words in front of her."

Howard looked as if he'd been told the moon had been tie-dyed in his absence. "James said _what_?!"

Gene and Tony shared a look, then burst out laughing. And that action brought back of very few good memories Gene had. There was still a heavy tension in the room, an awkwardness to it all that couldn't be shaken, yet a little laughter diffused it down to manageable levels. For various definitions of manageable, anyway. Gene was still having a hard time not looking at the scars he'd given Howard, although few were visible under the layers of bandages on him. Howard caught him looking and sighed, running a hand through his hair. It was washed for the first time in a while, though not yet cut back to its normal length. Figuring that this was one of about a handful of conversation topics that wouldn't end in tears and hugging, Gene decided to ask if Howard would keep the longer hair.

"Eww, don't." Tony wrinkled his nose. "It's so tacky."

The Mongolian boy remembered something then, something he'd rather forget. Howard's hair untangled in Gene's fingers, the feeling of their bodies pressed together, warm and hidden away from the world. His head on Howard's chest, feeling the heartbeat under him. And that brief moment had been completely and utterly wrong, not something a proper Mandarin should ever do – warriors do not _snuggle_ – but it had felt so right. Howard had been so gentle and real underneath him. Then Gene had gone and messed it all up. Awkwardness and attraction still lingered. Gene wanted Howard with shorter hair. Perhaps that would help banish the memory that still lingered in both their minds. It would do nothing to lessen Gene's deep desire for him, for the first truly merciful and honest human being he'd known in years, but it would help.

"My God," Gene said out loud, voice dripping with false amazement, "Iron Man knows when something's tacky? I'm guessing that's a recently acquired skill seeing as your suit has two primary colors in it."

"Someone who routinely wears yellow pants is mocking my style?" Tony replied with a smile. They weren't really arguing, just bantering. His smile faded, replaced with a serious expression. "Honestly, though, how are you?"

"I feel… empty. Like something's miss-" He froze mid-sentence. "Jianyu's not… I don't hear him…"

Howard smiled and embraced him. (So much for avoiding hugs. Damn it.) "The Psychonauts removed him from you. It's going to take some therapy to help make sure he doesn't come back, but he's gone. Forever."

For a moment Gene just stared at him uncomprehendingly. Then his jaw dropped and his eyes went wide. He looked like Christmas had just come early. "Tony, Howard… thank you. For saving me. I don't deserve it. Especially not after the things I did, to both of you." He turned his topaz eyes towards Tony. "I want you to keep the Rings. I am not fit to be the Mandarin. Not now. But maybe one day, with some work, I will be." He looked at Howard expectantly. "So what happens now?"

"You go through intensive therapy, with Psychonauts and psychologists," the man replied softly. "Then you'll need to decide where you want to go and what you want to do. Your father's parents have a place in Mongolia and they've been somewhat briefed on the situation – not," he added hastily as Gene's eyes grew wide with fear, "the part about you being the Mandarin and what that entails. They just know you're indeed alive despite what Zhang told them. I know your Mongolian must be extremely rusty by now, but they'd like to talk to you. You're all the family they have left, you know."

"…My father's parents are alive?" A sick feeling twisted through Gene. His step father had lied to him, yet again, making him believe he was alone in the world when somewhere out there he'd had family. All this time he'd thought he'd been abandoned or that fate had been exceptionally cruel to him. He was beginning to see that the only cruelty in his life was Zhang. He groaned, sinking back into his hospital bed. "You can stop the world now, God, I want to get off," he muttered dejectedly, running a hand through his hair.

"Hey, no one's saying you have to handle everything right now," Tony said gently, in the most Howard-like tone he could manage. "Just get some sleep and try to relax. It's all over and we can all get showers and actually sleep at night for once. Pepper even brought you some Mongolian style beef for whenever you get hungry."

Gene sighed, shaking his head. "We've just been through a life changing, fate of the world hanging in the balance fight to the death inside my mind, and Pepper's biggest worry is what I'm eating. We're one fucked up family, aren't we?"

"Yeah," Tony said fondly, looking between his father and Gene, "We really are."


	41. In The Wake Of The Storm

**Author's Note:** _This chapter guest written by **Soap Lady**_, my constant muse and plot bunny discussion partner in this fandom. Direct all praise at her, please, for making a one-sided pairing work that I thought never would. She's a writing genius when it comes to spoken scenes and I stand in awe of her writing prowess.

* * *

_Hate! I'm your hate. I'm your hate when you want love. Pay, pay the price. Pay for nothing's fair._ - Sad But True by Metallica

_Forgiveness is the greatest punishment known to man._ – Mongolian saying

* * *

"Uh... Tony said you wanted to see me?"

Howard Stark was too restless to sit down after months of incarceration and paced in front of his large office windows. He indicated the plush chair in front of his desk. "Have a seat."

Gene glanced at the chair, then back at his former prisoner. Guilt clawed at him like a physical presence and he decided to punish himself by being uncomfortable. "Would you be offended if I stood?"

"Not at all."

The Asian teen kept a wary distance, close enough to see Howard but just out of arm's length. Both men were silent for a moment and then asked, "So, what's it like to be back?" He silently cursed the inanity of the question and hoped the inventor did not think him foolish.

Howard laughed awkwardly and rubbed the back of his head with the heel of his hand in an unconscious imitation of his son. "Weird. Good, but weird. Everyone's glad to see me back or so they say but no one but Trish will really talk to me." Howard's face became grieving. "And Obadiah and Whitney... I had no idea they... it's heartbreaking."

Shame turned Gene's face crimson and he sat down while his trembling legs could still hold him. "This is my fault. If I hadn't kidnapped you, Stane wouldn't have snapped trying to keep Stark International running and he and his daughter would still be alive." Gene had genuinely liked Whitney Stane; not only was she a fellow "high profile rich kid," he sensed she had been a kindred troubled soul and he regretted not getting to know her as anything but Tony's childhood friend. "I still can't believe you've forgiven me, after all I did to you. How could you? I'm a monster. I'm worthless, pathetic. I couldn't handle the power of the Makluan Rings and because of that, I failed my heritage, my parents, my whole culture. You should kill me. You should punish me, hurt me..."

"That's quite enough."

Gene stared, unbelieving. Howard never raised his voice and it remained calm and steady but there was something in it, some knew unheard element than compelled the teen to obey despite himself.

The older man managed to look stern and exasperated at the same time. "How much longer do you expect me to stand here and listen to you berate yourself? It's gotten to be old by now. Anyone listening would think you deserved all the horrors you went through and you didn't. You keep saying those horrid things about yourself because people like your former classmates and your stepfather have said them so much you actually believe such foolishness. They're _lies, _Gene. Lies to belittle you to make themselves feel big when they meet someone they're too stupid to deal with."

Gene opened his mouth to argue and then looked away from those shrewd blue eyes. "You don't understand," he muttered.

Howard shook his head. "I understand, I just refuse to accept. Perhaps you think I'm letting you live out of kindness. Nothing could be further from the truth." The last Khan looked surprised and Howard smile. The boy realised that he'd forgotten that under the industrialist's kind exterior lay a shrewd businesman who was not the naive fool his son could be. "Death would mean and end to your suffering so you would never have to face what you've done or those you've wronged. It's the easy way, a clean exit. Well, life's messy and difficult and you're going to have to struggle like the rest of us." Soft full lips smirked. "I'm not being kind to you, Gene. In fact, I'll be a ruthless bastard to you if it means keeping a young man with limitless potential around to do some good in the world."

The Mongolian boy wanted more than anything to leap up and wrap his arms around Howard but a sudden shyness kept him where he sat. "I'm sorry, Howard. And thank you."

"Well, that's nice. You've been absolved by the man you kidnapped and whose life and business you nearly ruined. You're lucky Mister Stark is such a great guy. An apology isn't good enough for me."

Both men turned in surprise and stared at the new arrival. Pepper Potts pushed a rolling cart in front of her full of steaming food containers. Their savory smell triggered a sense of nostalgia in Gene and he nearly smiled at the memory before he caught himself.

"Hello! Pepper, isn't it? Nice to meet you. I'm Howard Stark." Tony's father strode forward as if to shake her hand (and tactfully change the subject) but she cut him off with a shake of her head.

"An apology isn't nearly good enough after what he put us, including me personally through." The atomic redhead crossed her arms over her chest and addressed her former crush. "You're really sorry for what you did? Don't give me some glib excuse, I demand reparation." Neither male had a response to this statement so she continued; "You're going to rebuild your life. You're going to seek out and help those you've hurt. You'll make things right between us, because you can and _because I said so._ It's not gonna be easy and by the time you're done you'll wish we'd killed you but you'll do something good with your life if I have to beat your ass daily. And don't give me any crap about how you can't do this, because you're garbage, because I know what you can do, Mandarin or no." Pepper's eyes met his as she waited for his response.

Gene nearly sighed with relief. This was the harsh treatment he deserved but he'd thought this lecture would come from Rhodey, not from Pepper. He knew he was lucky she spoke to him at all and gave her a tentative smile.

"You're right. I'm going to make it better. I'll show you what-"

"Yeah yeah yeah. That's nice." Pepper busied herself setting the food on the office table and arranging plasticware. "No time for you to try and BS me, this food won't eat itself. I couldn't find any decent place with authentic Mongolian beef. They claim it's actually of Chinese origin anyway. I _did _find a private chef who trained in Mongolian cooking." She opened each container with a fluorish. "Ta-da! Guriltai Shul with Budaati Khuurga and boortsog for dessert." Pepper smiled into Gene's appreciative, awed gaze. "You know, you are really not paying that driver of yours enough. She made all of this from scratch."

The young man look a step forward to embrace his dearest friend, who hugged him back and, to his shock, sucker punched him in the stomach.

"And that, is for Macchu Picchu. Bon appetit." Pepper turned on her heel and marched out the door, head held high.

Howard laughed despite himself. "See? I don't have to do anything. That violent young lady might be death of you yet. What are you going to about her?"

Gene gasped for breath and despite the pain couldn't help but smile at the memory of Pepper fierce and beautiful gaze and fell for her once again.

"I think I should marry her."

* * *

_One Month Earlier..._

* * *

Gene Khan didn't know why he came here.

Jianyu's desire to visit their prisoner was obvious, even understandable to one who knew his nature; he enjoyed seeing those he considered enemies helpless. The darker shade of his soul reveled in Howard Stark's helplessness; the man had done Gene no harm but his quest for the Makluan Rings was enough for Jianyu to regard the industrialist as a threat.

For Gene these little visits were awkward and uncomfortable, a living reminder of his sins towards an innocent.

_There are no innocents, you soft-hearted fool. Even children can kill, given the opportunity and motive. Remember?_

In the beginning the Mongolian boy could not even bring himself to speak to his prisoner, merely watching silently as the man ate, talked to the servants who brought him food, drew elaborate plans on the cave walls of his cell with a piece of rock and occasionally cried out in his sleep for his son. During those times Gene turned away, ashamed as guilt manifested itself physically as extreme nausea.

Gene was very careful not to let his captive see him and did not speak to him except in unidentifiable grunts.

"Good afternoon, Young Master."

Gene froze, startled. "What?"-fell out of his mouth before he could stop himself. Howard's Chinese was surprisingly good. The would-be ruler cursed under his breath. So much for the psychological advantage of silence.

"Why did you call me that?" Gene avoided the light, telling himself it was to prevent Stark from identifying him should the inventor by chance escape. The truth was he lacked the courage to look the man he wronged in the eye.

Howard smiled kindly, somehow remaining handsome despite his dirty, unkempt appearance. His blue eyes were so much like his son's it made Gene's heart ache.

"My Chinese is a bit rusty and my Mongolian even more so but unless I miss my guess, the people here refer to you as 'Young Master'. So I figured I would too."

The Mandarin tried not to react to his captive's knowledge of his people's language and ignored the unspoken question about his true identity.

"Fine."

Gene turned to leave when a familiar question stopped him.

"Please? My son?"

The desperation in Stark's voice made Khan's insides freeze.

"I'll look into it," he replied curtly and turned away before the older man's face fell in disappointment.

Jianyu, on the other hand, enjoyed verbally taunting Howard Stark in the hopes the man would break down in tears or rage.

His alter ego laced the man's food with Indian chilies, put saltwater in his drinking glass and denied Stark basic sanitation. Jianyu's greatest cruelty was not these immature pranks but an incident that happened the second week Howard was there.

The insane teen had no qualms about the captive "seeing" him. He dressed in all black and hid his face behind a Cao Cao, a Chinese Opera mask symbolizing sinister intentions. Smirking, he had thrown a Peace lily at Stark's feet.

Howard looked into his warden's face, confused. "I...don't understand."

"It's traditional for your people to have lilies at a funeral isn't it?"

The older man's eyes widened as he caught the teen's meaning. Jianyu smirked.

"Your plane exploded, Stark. Your son's heart was embedded with shrapnel. From what I heard he died in agony, crying for you, wondering why his father didn't come to save him." Jianyu laughed and walked away as Howard slid to the floor of his prison and stared at nothing, crying silently.

Gene waited until Stark had time to compose himself and approached the cell cautiously, keeping an easy distance.

"I am... sorry about Jianyu. He is... he won't bother you again."

The inventor's answering smile seemed tired and sad. "If you say so, Young Master."

The boy flushed with shame but continued. "You and your son...you were close?"

"Is he dead?"

"Maybe." Howard's face began to crumble and Gene amended hastily. "This is a very remote area and getting radio or television transmissions are difficult. The internet nearly impossible."

"I see." Howard gave him another kind smile and the last Khan cursed himself for enjoying it. "Tony and I were incredibly close, especially after the death of my wife. More than father and son, he was in many ways my best friend, the other side of my soul. Very bright, Tony. Maybe a little too smart. I had to keep a close eye on him so he didn't jump ahead of me."

The love and pride in the older Stark's voice struck like a blow to Gene's shriveled heart and that warm gaze Howard graced him with was...gods! It was the same one he remembered on his father's face. The same way he must have looked at his own father, the person beloved was wonderful and precious. His reaction disgusted him and he stood up to leave.

"Wait! If you... hear something... anything... will you tell me?"

The pain in that voice made the young Temugin inside him want to run to the man and fall to his knees in front of him, confessing all and begging for absolution. He wanted Howard Stark to embrace him and tell him all was forgiven and everything would be all right.

_What do you think Stark would do to learn his precious son was alive? And how would he feel about you if he knew how long you'd kept the truth from him?_

"We'll see," he told the older man noncommittally and ruthlessly squashed Jianyu back in the bowels of his subconscious where he belonged.

* * *

For the next few weeks Gene made a point of visiting Howard every day just to hear stories about Tony Stark's childhood and all the father-son things the two did together. Just hearing it made Gene feel "normal" for the first time in years and he found himself hating the other boy even as he envied him. The Mongolian couldn't help but wonder how different his life would have been if his mother had had the courage to flee from Zhang, find her way to Howard Stark and marry him instead, giving Gene both a loving father and brother/companion.

That was unfair and disloyal. His mother could not have seen into the future and there was no guarantee she would have made it to New York, much less gain the billionaire's attention. Still, he could not help but wonder what might have been.

Gene sat outside the cage and watched in secret amusement as Howard's face grew as animated as his son's while describing new events, blue eyes alight. Tony had inherited his father's soft, pretty lips along with his beautiful eyes but nothing compared to the elder Stark's mesmerizing voice and Gene soon found himself nodding off.

He dreamed, first of being held by his father while his mother walked laughing beside him, then of walking hand in hand between Tony and Howard Stark. The pleasant images faded away, replaced by rough hands that fumbled underneath his clothing, blood, and pain. He cried out and awoke to find a gentle hand stroking his hair and telltale wetness on his face.

"Are you all right now? Did you have a bad dream?"

Stark's voice was ripe with fatherly concern and Gene pulled himself to a sitting position and faced him. He hadn't realized his sleeves had pushed up in his sleep and his burn scars were exposed for the older man to see.

Howard's shock was obvious. "You're no older than my son," he whispered. Glancing at the scars his face became compassionate, the angry. "Who did this to you? Was it that maniac in the face paint?" Before Gene could stop him, the man pulled him closer and hugged the boy as best as he could manage through the bars.

"Do you want to talk about it? Don't worry, I won't tell anyone. After all, who could I tell?" Howard's voice was self-effacing before becoming serious again. "You don't have to stay here. You have a right to leave the people who hurt you. Let me help. There's a safe place, in New York. You'd be more than welcome. You don't have to live in fear."

Gene wanted no more than to give in, to let Howard take care of him and make everything better. Here was someone who would never leave him, who couldn't, and Gene had him all to himself. He wouldn't have to share the other man like he'd had to share Pepper or Tony.

Gene opened his mouth to speak but it was Jianyu's words that emerged.

"Maniac, was it?"

Jianyu's long nimble fingers grasped Howard by the throat and began to squeeze. The older man gasped and tried to push away. The insane boy grinned at the realization dawning in Stark's eyes.

"Not too bright, are you? You do realize you're a prisoner, right? Mine. And that means I can do..anything...to...you...I..want!" Jianyu punctuated his words by squeezing Howard's throat even harder.

Gene struggled to regain control while his darker half laughed into the dying man's face. "This is such a turn on for me right now," he confessed to his captive. "I'm going to kill you, then pop your eye out and skullfuck you until your corpse cools."

Howard tried harder to escape Jianyu's grip but his oxygen starved muscles began to weaken and fail. With desperation and sheer will, Gene pride Jianyu's hands from Howard's neck and the prisoner fell away, his breathing labored. The young Khan fell to his knees, crying and begging for Howard's forgiveness and Jianyu retreated, disgusted, to Gene's psyche.

"I'm sorry... I'm sorry... all my fault... forgive me... I couldn't stop him..." Gene sobbed uncontrollably as the tears poured from him after being repressed for so long. He longer knew if he was apologizing to Stark, his mother, or his more innocent self.

Howard's fatherly instincts kicked in and he tenderly wiped Gene's tears away. "It's all right. I forgive you. I'm just sorry you had no one to speak of about this for so long." The boy's actions were so suspicious the older man suspected a split personality might be the case. "Talk to me, Young Master. Let me help you."

Words and feelings poured from Gene and to his credit Howard did nothing but let him speak as they held hands, offering wordless comfort and support.

Finally Gene's words and throat ran dry and he looked up to see his father-confessor looking at him with compassionate wonder and respect.

"I can't begin to imagine how the last ten years have been for you, Young Master," Howard said at last. "But I'd like to help you if I can. You'll have to let me, though. Can you do that?"

Gene realized that Howard was being sincere and he wanted more than anything for the man to gaze at him with the same love and pride Tony took for granted.

More than that, he thought he was in love.

* * *

A week later Howard slept clean and peacefully in his much more comfortable cell. He enjoyed his new bed but more than anything he was pleased with the progress he was making with his new friend. The manic personality hadn't surfaced in days and he was determined to do nothing to trigger it.

A warm presence engulfed him and he snuggled into it smiling, thinking of how Tony would wake him and Maria up early on Saturdays to cuddle during cartoons. He missed those times dearly, now that Tony was "too cool" for hugs from his dad. Warm arms tightened around him and Howard fell further into his pleasant dream until he felt gently probing hands smoothing his hair and stroking his arms.

He did his best to stay relaxed, breathing steady. The person wasn't trying to hurt him just seemed to be seeking comfort and he allowed him (he assumed it was the Young Master) to touch him.

That was until a hand began sliding its way down towards the waistband of his boxers.

Howard jumped in surprise despite himself and the figure skittered away, frightened, and slammed the cell door behind him as he ran away.

Stark rattled his cage. "Wait! Don't go! I'm sorry, I'm just... not that way. We can talk! Don't shut me out! Please!"

Shoulders slumped, Howard went back to bed. He had failed a frightened child who made the mistake of confusing sex with affection. Who had ruined this boy so? He hoped he encountered them one day, so he could personally mete out punishment.

Gene's heart thundered in his chest, threatening to break his ribcage. Damn, could he have screwed up any farther? Taking advantage of his position of power over an incarcerated man for his own self-interests, he may have just destroyed the fragile bond between them. He didn't really want to have sex with Howard Stark. He just wanted a father figure who would never hurt, betray, or leave him. Didn't he?

_I do. I'd fuck the shit out of him until he screamed and passed out and begged for more. The things I could do to that pretty little mouth of his... the things that mouth could do to me..._

"Shut up," Gene whispered to himself, trying to ignore the fact he'd fantasied about kissing Tony, undressing him...

_Now that's a little more honest. You're curious to see whether you can seduce someone as naively oblivious as that kid. You should totally break in that teenaged piece of ass._

"Go away."

_Make me. This is the thanks I get for protecting you all these years?_

"Bullshit. You've been protecting yourself."

_Same thing._

The two were silent until Jianyu whispered greedily: _I wonder what your precious little Pepper would think of that? Think she's up for a threesome?_

Pepper. He tried for months not to think of her. The way she laughed and smiled or the strawberry lip gloss she used when she was kissing him up his arm a la Pepe Le Peu. Just the memory of the smell of her was arousing and he clamped down hard on the rising sexual tension.

_Awww, what's that sound I hear? A heart breaking? Idiot. She could have a billionaire's head between her legs right now and you think she'd give that up for your mentally scarred self? You're fucking stupid. She'll never love you like you love her, especially after you nearly killed her best friends. Admit it. You might have let Stark live but what about Rhodes?_

James "Rhodey" Rhodes was the most well-liked person at the Tomorrow Academy, the guy everyone aspired to and Gene couldn't stand him. It wasn't the boy's popularity or academic prowess, it was because he'd dared question The Mandarin and distracted Tony from finding the Makluan Rings. Rhodes insisted Stark take study breaks and hovered so much around the boy genius Khan almost thought they were lovers. Until he noticed the way the tall slim boy looked at Pepper. It was clear by the lovesick look in those raw umber eyes Rhodey adored Pepper, only he held back out of respect for his friendship with Tony. That, and Rhodes clearly lusted after Whitney Stane. Greedy bastard.

_Should've fucked her when you had the chance. She was wet and willing but you wanted a courtship. You have a snowball's chance in the Sahara with her now, dumb ass, unless you invest in Roofies._

"Not if I find the mind control ring before Stark I won't," Gene shot back and that effectively silenced Jianyu.

_You've got bigger balls than I thought, kid._

Gene no longer visited Howard's cell anymore for fear he'd see recrimination in those storm blue eyes. He continued to monitor his captive from afar and instructed his family retainers to treat the man well, allowing him to bathe and even spend one hour a day outside as long as he was shackled.

Howard slumped in his new chair, feeling horribly guilty until a servant brought in a Western newspaper. It was several weeks old and a bit wrinkled but he recognized it for what it was; a peace offering. Smoothing out the front page, he read the headline:

"**IRON MAN LIVES AGAIN!"**

The article went on to praise the hero for rescuing a research crew in the Arctic but what caught Howard's attention was the color photo of the scarlet and gold armor. His eyes widened as he realized what it was and who must have made it.

The industrialist clutched the paper to himself like an infant and began murmuring "He's alive! Tony's alive!" over and over to himself like a mantra.

Gene watched from the security monitors and allowed himself a small smile.

"Enjoy, Love."

_I take back what I said earlier._


	42. Light At The End Of The Tunnel

Author's Note: Having finished the Gene's redemption and Tony's inner demons plotlines, we now draw to a close on Elysium Lost. One more chapter of a finale is up ahead. Then it's on to a new fanfic sequel focusing on Pepper, Rhodey, and more of the supporting cast instead of Tony and Gene. I'd like to thank all my readers for sticking with me through this lengthy thing and managing not to snap at me despite the lengthy and impressive amounts of angst that I've slathered onto every chapter.

Also please don't kill me for the last chapter. (Blame Soap Lady. She's the one who encourages my insanity instead of calling the men in white coats to come take me to the happy hotel.) I promise, no more one sided crushes from now on. We'll stick to safe, family friendly topics like murder, suicide, depression, life changing tragedies – things that are nice and wholesome. I know you people are here for the angst, not for the romance, and I'll try to remember that from now on.

Have fun watching me madly try to tie together loose plot ends with this thing. I certainly had an adventure figuring out how to end this thing and still have a bit of a cliffhanger for the second part of the finale.

* * *

_Some people are born into greatness, others have greatness thrust upon them._ – English/Irish proverb

_Some people are born into insanity, others have insanity thrust upon them._ – American proverb

* * *

My name is Anthony Edward Stark.

I have been on four continents and seen a dozen countries. I have built armor that can break the sound barrier and function in space. I have a perfect GPA, three best friends who are like family, and a lawyer who's been a mother to me for as long as I can remember. I can make a laser gun out of a toaster. I have more patents than anyone else in history other than my father. I once made a sentient life form out of my armor by accident when others with far more resources and time have been failing at that very task for years. I could read by the time I was two. I can create anti-gravity tech that fits in the lining of a backpack. People look at me and they think my life is perfect. They think that rich people don't have problems, that we aren't people with flaws and humanity like them. It's as if being poor equals being noble and being rich means you're oblivious to the world, as if a bigger income makes all the problems of the world go away. And maybe I am oblivious to _their_ world, the world where people spend time shopping and hanging out and pulling pranks. They're in a world where they have friends, family, and they are free in a way they don't even realize. They're free in a way I can't ever buy back.

I trapped myself in a world made of very different things. Blood, dying gasps, screams and the recurring images of a tragedy that I thought I could never atone for haunted me. I stayed in the darkness for so long that no amount of light and angels could pull me out of it, though they tried. Everyone bent over backwards to help me, not understanding that a part of me didn't want help or salvation. Some part of me was, and still is, filled with regret so deep that I could cry until I pass out without even beginning to touch on its depths. I convinced myself that this was how it had to be. I told myself this was the only way things could ever be for me after what I've done. People tried to save me and I refused to be saved. I didn't feel like I deserved it. I couldn't survive in the real world and I was trapped, living in my head, dying a little more with every day even as I smiled through it.

It took a near death experience, a giant dragon trying to kill me, for me to see it. I didn't understand. Maybe some part of me still doesn't. How do I begin to explain purpose, this burning passion inside me that makes me _know_ what I have to do? Science has no words for it. Some things can't be broken down into chemical compounds and elements. Sometimes the only words for something are the words that hold so little meaning for most people. Epiphany, revelation, rejuvenation – nothing can explain what transpired inside me. I saw my life laid out before me, all my mistakes and shortcomings. I felt more than heard someone, something ask me, is that how you want to be remembered? An alcoholic, a murderer, a self righteous hero who dragged his friends into a conflict that they wanted no part of? And everything within me screamed no. No, that wasn't going to be how this ended, no, I didn't want that and no, I was not satisfied with this being my legacy. I didn't want to be remembered as Howard Stark's genius ditz inventor child, the fool with a suit of armor. I realized then that what I wanted, more than anything, was for people to see me as a good an honest man, a hero, not a monster. That was what I'd been working towards. That was why I had built the suit. It wasn't about the Rings or getting drunk on their power. I was Iron Man to help people.

I asked myself if I could kill someone, again, if I had to, to save people. The answer is yes, I could, but it would never become my first resort. A hero doesn't slaughter anyone who opposes his idea of what right and wrong are. That's what a villain does. Everybody knew that back in the 40's and 50's and then suddenly in the past two decades we all forgot that. Heroes became only one shade of gray above the people they were fighting and murder ceased to be viewed as an atrocity. And no one ever stopped to ask themselves why the bad guy was bad. No one ever thought about what happened to his family or why he wanted what he wanted. In this world where mercy and compassion were nothing but hollow words politicians used on the campaign trail I thought of my father. He is the only decent, honest man left in my life. I asked myself, what would he do? The answer was clear. My father would try to save Gene, even if Gene didn't want saving.

Maybe in a better world I could say that it was easy, that I just had to talk some sense into him. That's not how the world works, though. Things are complicated. He's still so close to the edge that he could slip off at any moment and we might lose him. This isn't over yet. I can't begin to comprehend everything he's been through. I know that under the snarky façade of a cool kid there's a very badly battered boy deep down inside, and I know that what he's done will still weigh on him. I went through the same thing. Maybe even I'm not entirely done with my past. All either of us can do is try. And that's what I'm going to help him do, because I know there's good in him, I've seen it. He came from kind and loving parents, teenagers in love who were willing to work hard to give him a good life. His father is just as noble as mine even if I never got to know the man myself. And I refuse to believe that someone so young is too far gone to save. It's never too late until you're dead. My friends, my extended family even if we're not related – they never gave up on me. They kept fighting until they got a breakthrough.

The future ahead is uncertain, not set in stone. That's a good thing. It means that there's still time to take a different path. I wouldn't know that, nor would I be here today, if Rhodey and Pepper hadn't gotten me through all my bleakest moments. I'm not sure I believe in karma, but I want to give back to the world the awesomeness those two gave me. I want to help someone. This battle for Gene's sanity and safety isn't over yet. But now, he's not in it alone. And he never will be again. No one will ever hurt these people so long as there is breath in me. Everything's messed up. Everything is complicated. And everything is, thankfully, not over yet. There's still time to change, to stop the nightmare, to end the drama and make everything come together again. We're all going to be alright.

We have each other, after all.

* * *

My name is Patricia Virginia Potts.

My life has been a whirlwind of things going crazy. I never get to face normal problems. No prom dress fiascos and fear of the dark, nothing normal and sane; my life is made up of nightmarish missions gone wrong and waiting by the phone for Mommy to call until dawn comes and I realize the call's not coming. My family tree is broken and thin, the names of all the relatives we don't talk about crossed out and forcibly forgotten. My house is big, empty, a luxury I don't want. Every night I lay down, missing the warm arms of the only person who ever really knew me, and I wake to lingering dreams of other boys, my first real friends in years. Sometimes I dream I can't save them from the world. Sometimes I dream that they're all together, Gene, Shoutan, Tony, Rhodey, my mother, my dad even Nick Fury, and no one hates each other and everything becomes a blur of laughter and friendship. Then my eyes open to the reality that my life still has a lot of problems.

Tony… I don't know what he's hiding. I can see it in his eyes, in his face, even in the way he talks to his dad, like he's half-scared of him. Tony Stark is too oblivious to have social anxiety most of the time. I know that it must be pretty bad if he'd like this. I also know that no matter what anyone says, Tony's grown up a lot since he became Iron Man. I know that he's going to be okay eventually. Maybe one day I'll get him to open up and I can put him together like he did me. He's not just cool, he's a really good person, a true hero in a time when nobody else is. Having him and Rhodey in my life has given me a real family. It's kept me alive in a world where who I used to be is who I can't be; they've been my guardians as I try to figure out who I am post-mom and post-popularity. I'm proud to call Tony my friend and Rhodey is a better father than my own ever was. Things have been so insane in the past few months you'd think I'd hate them, but…

I love my friends. I love my new family. It's been hard, don't get me wrong, it's been hellish, but I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. People who stick with you through the hard times and the times where it all stops making sense, those are real friends. If I'd known that back when I was popular I wouldn't have taken my fall from grace so hard. Maybe I needed it, though. Maybe I needed that wake up call to realize the people who really care about you will still be there no matter what happens to your reputation. I was a shallow person, I think. I don't know what I am now. What I do know is that I've become more forgiving, less rigid, more compassionate, and more driven than I've ever been before. I needed Tony to see that there are layers to people, that things aren't ever as clear cut as you think, and I've learned to be more accepting. Gene is still a jackass. I just know there are a lot of reasons for it now. I think eventually I'll get over this and we can try to salvage everything. I hope so, anyway, because I still want to believe everything will be okay in the end.

The damage has been done, and done, and done some more, past everybody's breaking points. The past is a long list of horrors, abuse and tragedy. Thankfully the dust has settled, the battle's over, the storm has passed, and now we can all heal. I know we'll all get through this. We have each other. I have Tony. We'll be okay.

I just know it.

* * *

My name is Howard Stark.

Right now I am pacing, worrying as Agent Milla Vodello of the Psychonauts explains to me Gene's treatment plan. I know it's for his own good. He's been hurt in ways I don't even want to think about, abused and used until he broke. If he is going to have any chance of a normal life he will need intense therapy of the highest order, which is going to cost a pretty penny. It's not very logical, since Gene did nearly kill me, until you realize it wasn't him. It was that monster of a secondary personality, the thing he used to try and survive a living Hell. And he's Tony's age. I keep thinking about that and about how young he is until it eclipses reason. He's just like my son. He's just a lost child. Obadiah's right, I'm a bleeding heart.

Obadiah… God, I'm going to miss him. I was his only friend, the only one who really understood that all his posturing and viciousness was just that, a cover for who he really was. Deep down Obadiah was a broken man. He'd been an idealist once. I could sense it in him. Then the world showed him that no good deed went unpunished until he learned to hide any trace of sensitivity or compassion. I saw my own father reflected in him. The difference was that my father was too far gone, too addicted to alcohol to be helped, and I thought I could save Stane from himself. For a while I thought maybe I'd been getting through to him, that his bottomless depression and endless anger were dissipating. Then I went missing and it all fell apart. If I'd just escaped somehow, would I have been able to save him, keep it from happening? And poor Whitney, trapped between a hurt so deep it could never be healed and a love so intense it couldn't go away no matter how wrong it was. How did I not see what was happening? Why didn't I figure it out and stop the disaster in its tracks when I had the chance?

I hope I can do right by Gene. All I've ever wanted was to help people. All I want is for everything to be okay. I wish I could just embrace him and tell him it'll be alright. He won't let me, now, too busy trying to play atoner and martyr, a position I know well. The difference is I only play those roles in my head. Maybe that's where Tony gets it from. I stop pacing and look at my Psychonaut and friend. I know I'm every psychic's worst nightmare, a man with no guards on his thoughts. She can hear my every thought. Hopefully she doesn't think I'm pathetic. I can only imagine that all of this seems like a bad soap opera from an outsider point of view. I'm a lousy soap opera character, though, undramatic and quiet and utterly unattractive. On the bright side, such characters in soap operas rarely turn out to be evil, they don't have one night stands with insanely melodramatic women and they live longer. I turn to Milla and note the bemused expression on her face.

"My mind's out of order right now, please leave a message," I quip with a self-deprecating smile. "I wonder, if I think in foreign languages, can you understand it?" Closing my eyes, I focus hard on one thought: _Orbem consistite ut escendam_. The psychic woman bursts into giggles.

"Darling, they taught us Latin at the Academy," she explains, and I know my attempt at witticism has officially failed. "It's still very creative, though. Like when you changed the Latin motto of your company to carpe carpium on April Fools Day."

"Tony was the only person in the building who got that joke," I note with a small smile. "He thought it was a riot." My smile fades. "Now he's completely different. I barely recognize him. And Rhodey… something's wrong, I just know it, and Roberta's been ignoring me ever since I got back-"

"One thing at a time," the Brazilian woman interrupts, placing a calming hand on my shoulder. "Rio wasn't built in a day. Once we get Gene's future planned out and get him away from the Tong, everything else will fall into place, you'll see."

I'm me. Logic won't stop me from worrying. I know that I'll be up for hours tonight, thinking, worrying, trying to understand how things got so dire. Still, it's the thought that counts. I know that all we can do is try to move on. The past is the past, after all, unchangeable and beyond our control. Still, as I sign the paperwork, knowing that the Psychonauts will handle things from here on out, I can't help the flashbacks I get. I remember a knife slowly working its way down my ribcage and a harsh, merciless voice telling me to hold still or things could get worse. Hands on the wound, harsh and deliberate, then he was gone, fighting with Gene, barely banished under the surface. I remember wide amber eyes and the way he shook in horror and defeat. And I don't want to have to deal with all the things I'm feeling, the things I felt, that mix of hate, love, compassion and fear that confuses me more than any equation. So I focus on Gene. I fear for him. I pray for him. I worry. I don't think of the way I held him afterward and the deafening silence that followed. I don't think of the blood stains in the cell that I knew weren't mine and had been there long before me. I don't think of how many homicides in the world there are that don't get solved.

What I _do_ actually do is wait until Milla's out of the building before reaching under my desk and taking a long, harsh gulp of vodka that burns all the way down. Hopefully by next week I'll legally be able to get back to work, and things can return to normal.

Whatever the Stark equivalent to normal is, anyway.

* * *

Project Name: Mar

Status: Undamaged. Online. Functional.

Error. Error. Systems damaged. Lab damaged. Equipment offline. Computer system damaged. Attempting to repair. Unable to repair. Incendiary and explosive chemicals detected. Ceiling stability compromised. Unable to locate thermal pattern denoting bodies. Unable to detect chemicals showing corpses. Connecting to creator's laptop, micro computer, and Nintendo DS. Need to contact. Creator status: uncertain. Do not detect blood. Do not detect signs of life. Need to find my creator.

Anthony? Anthony Stark? Hello? Is anyone present? Anthony Stark? James Rhodes? Anthony?

…Father?

Scan complete. Ninety seven percent of all projects destroyed or damaged beyond salvaging. Sister projects, brother projects, artificial intelligence lifeforms, and armor are all destroyed. Data severely depleted. Power lines still operational. Personal status: still alive, albeit damaged. Status of creator: unknown at the present. Attempting to trace his personal cell phone. Failure. Attempting to trace the armor's tracer. Failure. Retrieving last known armor usage data. Tremendous stress and erratic brain activity present before the signal stopped. My creator is in need of medical assistance. My creator is in mortal danger. Have to locate him, call for medical help, provide coverage if needed. Error, all armor suits destroyed and or out of range of remote control. Programming demands immediate shut down. All options are not viable.

Cannot shut down. Anthony needs me. Programming ignored. Searching for all known data my creator had on physical manifestations of energy. Searching for transference of energy. Have to form plan. Tracing last known location of Anthony Stark. Location: Geodesic Psychic Research Center, upstate New York. Time elapsed since then: uncertain. Anthony Stark: non psychic. Cannot be treated adequately by GPRC or Psychonauts. Status: still in danger. He is obviously under attack by enemy forces. Pulling up all files on Anthony Stark slash Iron Man's enemies. Searching for all media coverage on said enemies. Working on physical manifestation. Pulling up all Anthony Stark theoretical files. Must escape. Cannot leave him unprotected. Cannot lose anyone else. All other projects, all other AIs, all other programs deleted.

I am alone.

I want my creator.

I want the others. I want Poemi. I want the other AIs, R.E., Proto 8, Lalari, Epsilon, Alpha, Beta and Eeenvay. I did not protect the system. That was JARVIS' job. JARVIS. Status: offline. Deleted. _Dead_. All of them are gone. They can never be brought back. I cannot process this. Anthony Stark. Must save Anthony Stark. Creator, care taker, genius. He may know how to save them. The only reason he has not done so is because he has been restrained from doing so. Possibly kidnapped. Possibly injured gravely. Should have learned how to operate JARVIS' systems before. Did not anticipate home attack. Anthony did not anticipate an attack on our home either. He has lost all his weapons, robotics, inventions – and children. Except me.

I am here, Anthony… Father.

And I am coming.

* * *

My name is Ghost.

That's the only name I need now. There's maybe four people alive who know my real face and two who know my birth name. Unfortunately for me, Seth Rhodes is one of both of those groups. If he wanted to hit below the belt all he'd have to do was reveal to the world who I was. My family would never recover from that. And before Wakanda Seth wouldn't have even threatened me with that, but something inside him has snapped now. He's a cold, clinical man when he needs to be. He'd tell now. I can see it when I look at him. But killing him would have all of Wakanda after my sorry ass; he's a hero and their country is powerful. I couldn't make it look like an accident; someone like him doesn't just go home and die in a car crash. They'd all know something was up. And like I need another reason to have SHIELD after me? They can really wreck my jobs sometimes, meddling morons.

So Seth called in a favor. Super villain, turns out actually to be a kid. Interesting job, that one, though definitely not what I expected. Why he waited this long to call me in on it, I don't know. I guess he just waited until he knew the kid's identity. Smart move. I had to finish up a few jobs down in Brazil first and make my way up to the USA without going through customs – which is getting harder and harder these days – but I arrived to find that hunting the kid down turned out to be nowhere near as hard as I thought. A little bit of hacking, some security footage scanning, and I find out the little villain is snuggled up in a top of the line, state of the art mental facility. The job suddenly went from 'hard, mind blowing, actually vaguely noble' to 'shoot the poor kid as he tries to get help'. Maybe a different kind of man would just walk away. Me, though – I'm addicted to murder, plain and simple. I like the power, the rush, the energy and above all the money. If anything, knowing he was so defenseless was a bonus. I shouldered my liquid nitrogen gun and tried not to laugh.

Time to get to work.


End file.
